All you have are assumptions of the motives. A Katie Couric and 5 oClock King 5 version of what is happining and why. In a notoriusly activist, contrary and liberal community ,Seattle. People live here for a reason they tend to think and want to live differently than people in LA, New York. Occams razor suggests that the simplest answer is generally the correct answer. In the case of this war the simple answer is to end terriorism agaist our country and allies. There are also very simple reasons why it is playing out a certain way publically and one would be ill informed at best to draw any conlusions by what they see in the main stream media. To point this out you need to go listen to people speak that have been to Iraq and hear first hand how stable and normal the vast majority of the country is today. Have you read or seen anything on any news channel that will show you this?

Here is a piece that a friend wrote. He is closely attached to a Military unit serving in Iraq.

Some of us remember the Fatwas and Jihad the Iranian mullahs issued way back in the late 70s. Those are still in effect today. The mullahs are the driving force for the muslim terrorists.

Pull out your world map book and look at Iran. We have the eastern flank now of Afghanistan. Predators, SPECOP snipers and patrols interdict the Afghanistan/Pakistan border so no weapons or troops get in or out.

We also control the western flank of Iran, Iraq. We control the flow of arms there with the same methods

It's called cut off and contain. The Ayatollah Homeni's grandson hisself in Iran is making noise that Iran must change. The mullahs are soiling their robes with all the Crhistians In Action work there now.

WMD? Oil? Imperialism? Nope, that's not why we're in Iraq. We're taking the battle to the terrorists and doing a pretty darn good job of it. Don't be surprised if we roll Iran with armor if the revolution our spooks are trying to get started doesn't succeed.

The true impact of Iraq appears in this assessment by an air commando vet:

It reflects what many of my colleagues are saying...the job is not finished, but we are winning at every encounter with the bad guys...however, casualties can’t be the measure of our success...after all, one of my planning buddies pointed out, the UN said there would be 500,000 casualties in the first three days of fighting...we aren’t even close to that on either side...from the US planning perspective, 14,000 was the estimated number of casualties...if Bush thought that was an acceptable trade to take down the threat of Saddam, then he certainly isn’t going to flinch at the daily deaths reported so widely by the national news sources, especially when he is getting objective reports that detail how well things are really going on the ground.

I still haven’t seen anyone connect the dots yet about isolating Iran using Iraq and Afghanistan as a US controlled buffers that restrict overland travelin and out of Iran. The Iranian trained terrorists now find it much more difficult to travel to the Syrian/Lebanon staging ground for Hamas and the rest of the Muslim murderers who plot the destruction of Israel from that safe haven. The strategy from day one after September 11 was to isolate Iran and its hate-mongering Mullahs despite the suspicion of the Saudi’s and their complicit funding of terrorism through Islamic charities. On the East, Afghanistan and Pakistan form a boundary that requires deception, planning, and more difficult travel routes in order to infiltrate those countries. The presence of US technology overhead is a constant threat to the terrorists and their safe passage into target populations of their destination. The same is true on the West...Iraq is now dominated by a US presence that make a traverse of the northern route to Syria impossible without deception and better planning on the part of the Iranian terrorist groups. This strategy is showing some results in the Syrian-Jordan area as intercepts of terrorist convoys disguised as regular commercial truck traffic has been greatly increased. The best example of that is the Syrian border conflict a few weeks back where the Syrian border guards tried to assist the smugglers in running the border and paid the price for their belief that we would let these guys roll into safe haven without a fight.

Our strategy of isolating Iran will never be acknowledged by DoD, but I’m sure you recognize your favorite SECDEF, our man Rummy, as a critical thinker in the evolution of this policy of isolating our enemies...can you spell containment?...same strategy, just a different application for a different enemy.

Another reason for the removal of Saddam was the need for a staging ground for US forces outside of Saudi Arabia. PSAB (Prince Sultan Air Base) is now a ghost town compared to what it was five months ago. The US presence in Saudi has been reduced considerably because our forces are now using airfields in the western deserts of Iraq. This has not been lost on Syria or Iran. We can strike Syria with enough airpower to render their entire military capability useless in less than 15 minutes. In the case of Iran, we have three directions from which we can assault their airspace. They only have enough airpower to oppose one assault corridor...and most of that is focused on the southern route since that has been the traditional assumption of entry from Qatar and Bahrain. The east and west routes are lightly defended relative to the south...and from the north, it is an open door to Tehran if we chose to stage out of one of the ‘Stans where we now have a formidable logistics presence.

In any analysis of this strategic plan of isolating Iran, one must conclude that it is remarkable in its flexibility and brilliant in its simplicity. Best of all, it is based on solid military science and tactical considerations that require political patience, military discipline, and the determined focus of strong leadership on winning the war by eliminating the bad guys and governments that support them.