author=maestro
The only way that Iraq can stave this off is to allow fully unfettered and unscheduled inspections.
You would of course welcome unfettered & unscheduled inspections of your own person, home, & property at whim (without any related evidence of wrong doing).
No doubt any upstanding real American would immediately agree to this. After all, patriotism now means bending over for ones government when told to do so (sans lube)... for our own good of course. (tongue in cheek)
Oh wait... we already do so... thanks in part to that wonderful (anti) Patriot Act, and the mass of crap decrees which followed it on a nearly weekly basis.
I stand corrected. 
"He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty, he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself."
-- Thomas Paine
This is more like a situation where a warrant has been sworn to search your house, and you won't let them into the bathroom.
And once again to reiterate, there is no law protecting the rights of nations. Nations' rights only exist to the extent that the nation can defend those rights. By necessity, there is no rule of law between nations. To have enforcable rule of law between nations would require a global government.
However, to state all obvious reasons, and attempt to demonstrate such, would leave me with too many fronts to work with, which I'm not about to do (I also have to occasionally get work done too, otherwise customers get ticked off. 
) Its more than enough effort to simply point out a couple issues at a time - currently oil/natural gas & war profiteering.
You've no need to rehash the fact that some politicians (many?) will profit from this war. I concede that fact.
There is nothing inherently wrong with making money off of war. If the war needed to be fought, we can't _not_ fight it because someone, somewhere might make some money.
Even when the same folks orchestrating the situation are the ones profiting from it? Kinda like a doctor releasing a plague to keep himself in patients. Certainly nothing wrong with charging for services rendered, but um... even when one is creating those very same scenerios which then require ones services?
I would argue that your simile doesn't apply appropriately. Imagine the doctor gave you a treatment to cure an illness, but that treatment caused a side effect (which was known to be likely). The doctor would be well within his rights to charge you for an additional treatment to diminish the side effect.
I contend that the war must be fought for reasons _not_ pertaining to oil. If this to be true, there is nothing wrong with making money off the war.
As such, we shoudl be arguing over whether the war does or doesn't need to be fought, not that the government might make money off the war. In fact, if the _government_ (rather than the politicians) can make money off the war, all the better, since that would mean _we_ would pay less of the cost of waging the war.
The problem/solution creation concept in itself isn't a issue of course - this idea has been around for a long time (this method - though not intentional - pays the bills of most folks in the puter field, as the solution to an existing problem tends to become the next problem, sigh), but it becomes very dirty business when it results in major loss of life, extensive property damage, and such.
if it can be unintentional in the computer business, can't it be unintentional in politics? You seem to just jump at the chance to attribute every political action to malice, rather than stupidity where it often belongs. There _are_ good people in politics, who try to do what they feel is best for the country. Of course they are not altruistic, per se, since they gain power and a upper-middle class income from doing this, but one needs not be an altruist (if such a creature exists) to do good things.
There is also the matter of agreement (or not) between the parties involved to conduct such business in the first place. I have not agreed to such (which comes out of my tax dollars, and goes into whos pocket? Yours? Certainly not mine... unless I've invested in war related industries, and even then I'll only see a fraction of it return if I'm lucky. The mass profits are taken off the top, not the bottom.)
Until we have a successful Free Nation Project, we will have taxes, and those taxes will pay for what the politicians determine we have asked for (since we voted them in). This complaint is immaterial in the current political setting.
