Going to war is difficult for any democracy. Preemption just complicates a complicated matter.
meanwhile I can't figure out or even guess what's the behind the scenes story on Iraq's captured documents. Rep Pete Hoeksta demands access to the documents. He's Chair of House Intelligence Comm.
Here's an old piece
http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/opinions/articles/1223fri2-23.html
"What really went on in Saddam Hussein's Iraq prior to the invasion that ousted him?
What did the dictator really do with the weapons of mass destruction that United Nations inspectors knew he had? Did Saddam serve up his country as a training ground for al-Qaida and other terror groups? Did Saddam instruct foreign terrorists in the uses of weapons of mass destruction?
At least five postwar analyses of pre-war Iraq - from the Duelfer Report on Weapons of Mass Destruction to the Senate Intelligence Committee report - have failed to satisfy war critics on these questions and many others. And for good reason in one important respect: Virtually none of the postwar reports have provided any sense of finality.
Are the questions, then, answerable? Perhaps they are. It may be that the answers are right within our grasp.
The U.S. Department of Defense is in possession of more than 2 million documents captured after the fall of Baghdad, many of them from the Iraqi Intelligence Service. They include handwritten documents, audio and videotapes, formal documents, photographs and other data captured off computer hard drives that Saddam's bureaucrats failed to destroy in time.
Soon after the fall of Iraq, the Defense Department established a "document exploitation" program known as DOCEX, headquartered in Doha, Qatar. Translating, organizing and, above all, authenticating these millions of documents has proved extraordinarily difficult. So much so that despite employing more than 600 translators working round-the-clock shifts, no more than 50,000 documents thus far have been fully "exploited," in the military's lingo.
Almost none of these documents have been circulated among policymakers in the Bush administration, according to the lone wolf seeking the public release of the DOCEX documents, journalist Stephen F. Hayes of the Weekly Standard.
If it is difficult to imagine that the truth behind Saddam's biggest secrets remains tantalizingly just out of our grasp, well . . . the story gets worse still.
According to Hayes' report in the Dec. 19 issue of the Standard, the entire deciphering program may be shut down at the end of this month if certain officials in the Defense Intelligence Agency have their way.
Hayes has launched an ardent editorial campaign in his magazine to save the deciphering program. Likewise, Rep. Pete Hoekstra, R-Mich., chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, as well as other members of Congress, has argued to continue this program.
The Bush administration has long claimed that it is unafraid of the truth regarding Iraq. While that argument may have been largely validated by the after-action analyses, they have not convinced many critics.
Would Saddam's own words make a difference? Maybe. Maybe not. But it is absolutely imperative that we find the truth.
Especially those truths well within our grasp."