From a netfriend:

It is highly offensive and utterly unrealistic to blame protesters for this war or for Saddam Hussein’s resistance. Protesters support non-violent resolution of disputes. We support disarmament – of everyone who has weapons of mass destruction. We support all nations being held accountable when they ignore UN resolutions. The protesters simply do not accept that Iraq is the most dangerous, highly armed, or evil of nations – plenty of others can vie for that status. Other nations than Iraq also have weapons of mass destruction in contravention of international law. Other nations than Iraq ignore UN resolutions. Other nations than Iraq commit despicable crimes against their own citizens. The question the protesters ask is: why Iraq? why now? and why war, instead of the international courts and tribunals.? The USA failed to pay its dues to the UN for years, weakening its work by starving it of funds. Now it condemns the UN for being weak. What hypocrisy. The hypocrisy of course is much larger than this – the UK and the USA provided weapons, technology and loans to Saddam Hussein in the 1980s, and silenced those journalists who tried to draw attention to the horrific crimes that he was perpetrating against his own people. It is said that he committed his worst crimes against his own people while he was the ally of the UK and the USA. So don’t blame the protesters. We did not arm Saddam Hussein. We did not silence those who tried to expose his crimes in the past. The USA did that.

The problem is that the USA does not want to cooperate with the alternatives to war. It does not want to go the legal route. The nations who believe that Saddam Hussein has breached international law by committing crimes against humanity and war crimes should either ask for him to be prosecuted in the International Criminal Court, or, if he somehow falls outside its ambit, in a specially convened tribunal (a process used recently for other people accused of crimes against humanity). The USA does not like such mechanisms – it they are used for other people, they could potentially also be used for US leaders. That is, the US does not want to be accountable in international law, so they won’t use legal processes. They have to go to war instead. That is not a failure of the UN, or of the protesters, but of the USA which wants to be the world’s policeman, as long as it can also be prosecutor, defence counsel, judge, jury and executioner, and as long as it is given total discretion to decide when the law applies and to whom.

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