I do agree with your assessment of the process being questionable. Like many other people, I cannot help thinking that if Saddam would not sit on a big stash of oil, he would not be bothered.

While Kuwait and Saudi Arabia have questionable and quite undemocratic governments as well, they tolerate a certain American presence on their soil - presumably to prop up their own regime. This tolerating also helps the US get a fairly reliable supply of oil.

I believe that the past has shown that the solutions of the UN Security Council are only selectively enforced - i. e. whenever they serve a greater political or economic purpose. The resolutions to disarm Saddam have been on the books for a while (After all, the previous Gulf War took place in 1991), and no one was really serious about enforcing it until after 9/11, and when Osama bin Laden could not be apprehended, they turned to the old standby Saddam again. When one looks at the situation without emotions, one can see that Osama bin Laden, a religious fanatic and Saddam Hussein who heads a pseudo-Socialist party have little in common, and probably do not even like each other. So why would Saddam even cooperate with Osama bin Laden in planning 9/11?

If my memory serves me right, there are resolutions concerning the Israeli-Palestinian dilemma on the books at the UN, but the US do not think about enforcing these resolutions, especially those that take the Israelis to task, because they do not want to antagonize the Jewish lobby around the world. I am not anti-semitic or pro-Palestinian, but I think there is a certain double standard here.

Even if the aforementioned countries do not have any weapons of mass destruction as the US claim Iraq has, there are enough other states who also have weapons of mass destruction (Russia, China, India, Pakistan, France, North Korea, Great Britain and the US all are known nuclear powers - and nuclear weapons are certainly weapons of mass destruction).

Lillibelle