President Bush is way out on a limb with his tough warspeak. How can he ever crawl back, after braying so loudly and so long about "changing the regime" in Iraq? Trouble is, he has yet to convince the Pentagon, the CIA and many in Congress. Not to mention everybody else in the world, including Iraq's closest neigbors, our European allies and the U.N.

Bush wants to topple Saddam because he seems to think that he can get away with it, in the context of long-standing U.S. policy to dominate and exploit the whole world. Saddam is a punching bag for U.S. imperialism, nothing more. After all, he was a useful ally of Reagan, Bush Sr., Don Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney when they needed his military services against Iran. They even downplayed Saddam's use of poison gas against the Kurds, going so far as to veto Congressional sanctions on Iraq at the time.

I do believe that if there really were evidence that Iraq posed a legitimate threat to U.S. national security, much less world peace, the debate and the war would already be over.

Instead, while Bush fulminates and plots, we still buy Iraq's oil and Dick Cheney's Halliburton Corporation still cashes Iraq's checks for the on-going reconstruction work they're doing over there since the last Gulf war. All this, while U.S. bombers patrol two-thirds of Iraq's airspace with impunity and sanctions continue to cripple the isolated and weakened regime. Some threat, indeed!

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