I didn't use the word potential. Iraq violated the cease fire pretty much daily.

And I already stated that was not our official reason for going in. I get that. However, it certainly means it wasn't illegal.

That's a matter of opinion.

I really haven't kept up on it. How did they violate the cease fire daily when we monitored the north and south no-fly zones on a constant basis?

Was it the food-for-oil program scandal? And, if so, wouldn't it have been better to go after our purported allies or bigger fish who aided and abetted?

Sorry, if you're going to play legal technicality as justification, you still lose. The cease fire they were accused of violating was an agreement with the UN. The terms of that cease fire certainly gave the UN the option of acting on the violation. However, the very body that signed the cease fire and made the rules did not decide that those violations warranted action. Any action by the US due to that cease fire remains illegal.

If someone is convicted of murder with special circumstances in a state with the death penalty, but the jury recommends against the death penalty and the judge agrees, that does not give a police officer the right to kill the defendant on the grounds that he has been convicted of something that might carry the penalty of death. If the decision was no death penalty, then no death penalty.

Not going to go through the same arguments that we've been through 100 times. Not going to change you, not going to change me. ISM, just answer your questions, they fired on our aircraft patrolling the no fly zone regularly and were also guilty of using helicopters ain the no fly zone against groups of Kurds.

(And actually, GD, the cease fire was declared by GHWBush after Iraq agreed to the 12 conditions from the UN. The UN made the conditions, the US declared the cease fire. The UN did not declare the cease fire, they only brokered it. Sorry....had to do it even though I said I wasn't going to).

Sooo.... What you are saying is that all the previous reasons the Bush Administration used to justify the invasion were false? If violating the cease fire was the real justification, why didn't they say so from the beginning? Why did they lie to us about WMD, 9/11, et al?

I'm saying the intelligence was wrong, which I have said before. I do not believe it was intentionally falsified, so I don't subscribe to the lied aspect.

I aso didn't claim the violation of the cease fire was the real justification. I'm saying that this fact made it not illegal to invade.

And your response to the fact that it WAS illegal to invade because the body that made the rules under which your purporting the US had legal authority specifically did not grant that authority? See the death-penalty analogy.

Ok... Assuming the WMD excuse was incompetence on their part, as you say, why did they keep trying to convince the American public that Saddam was behind 9/11?

McCain has voted anti-women's rights something like 186 times. And he looks like the reanimated dead.