[Wanderer]

and your london times aticle does not state that around 70% of the brits and about 80% of the polish people... are against a war without the un.

Do you expect the media to ever give a fair account of anything?

If you read the article, you might notice it never mentions going it alone.

Argh, I can't let this go! It's not an editorial, or an article. Check the bottom of the page - it's a letter from eight European heads of state. Mind, it's interesting that they've put it in the editorial section and not the letters page (maybe it was too big).

I'll admit that whatever happens, various sections of the media will push their own agenda... "Discovered chemical warhead was 'planted by American spy'", "Saddam officially 'worse than Hitler' says scientific report" etc.

When you accuse somebody of murder, the burden of proof lies on you.

He's not being accused of murder (well, he is but that's a separate thorny issue [how many world leaders are responsible for gratuitously killing members of their populace? - sadly all too many to use it as a casus belli]). The analogy to law is that he's already been found guilty of a crime (being caught with an illegal weapons program), and could be guilty of violating his parole (by not dismantling said weapons program in an open and verifiable manner).

In Northern Ireland, the Unionists don't like the fact that although the IRA are decommisioning weapons under the eyes of an independent third party, there's no real way of telling how many weapons they obtained in the first place. If my understanding of what Blix said is correct, Iraq appears to have fairly complete records of weapons built, but incomplete records of them being dismantled. To continue the analogy, this would be enough to get a search warrant and arrest (but probably not yet charge) the suspect.

Like a lot of people, I don't want a war, but if we do invade, I want it to be under the auspices of the UN. Acting alone could cause more problems than it solves - to strain the analogy past breaking point, we don't want the pair of policemen (who initially don't get on but by the end of the film have formed a Lasting bond) to have their badges taken off them and told they're off the case, leaving one to mutter "I'm getting too old for this s**t" and the other to become suicidally paranoid .