1.) It was against International Law. The Bush Administration misinterpreted the various resolutions and badly bent their meaning to give legal cover to the invasion. The inspectors had not finished their work and the U.S. was, apparently, witholding information that could help them do it.

2.) The planning was terrible. Too few troops, to little actionable intelligence, and too much reliance on defectors and electronic surveillance for that intelligence. While ideas were flying about what to do with post-war Iraq, there really wasn't any sort of plan presented that looked reasonable at the time.

3.) Iraq was the wrong target. Al-Qaeda was and still is the main target we should be pursuing but we lack the foresight and leadership to do it.

4.) The war was sold as part of a broad ideological conflict that didn't exist. I don't believe in the Cold War sounding hype that we're in a new era with a new kind of war, blah blah blah. The epic overtones of the Bush Administration immediately raised a red flag; anyone who thinks of the world in those terms needs to be kept far away from the levers of government power. We would have been much better off if all of that "vision" were directed to figuring out how to handle post-war Iraq.

My rationales have changed a bit here and there since then, but those were my core reasons for opposing the war with Iraq. I think we've ignited something of a global struggle with terrorism inasmuch as Iraq has become a recruiting tool for extremist groups (on both sides of the conflict). However it nothing on the threat scale anywhere near what we faced during the Cold War.

1. I opposed the war because, like Vietnam, it seemed to emanate from the exigencies and prejudices of Beltway politics rather than from an empirical consideration of the local situation. This suggested poor planning.

2. I believed that by invading Iraq, and by his general belligerence, Bush was, and remains, Al Qaeda's best recruiter, save for Cheney.

3. I believed General Shinseki that the US was not deploying sufficient numbers of troops for a successful occupation.

4. No one of conscience or good will liked Saddam, but the US can't and doesn't right every wrong in the world.  There was never a convincing case that he was a significant danger to the US or had participated in the attacks.  Cheney wanted this war because he saw Iraq as lowlying fruit ripe for the picking.

I was against it at the time because I'm generally opposed to war.

That would have been good enough on its own absent a strong and compelling justification.  The fact that it was clearly ideologically driven, preemptive, premised on faulty information and obfuscation, unsupported by our allies or the international community, was lacking in a clear objective or end-plan, etc. only made my resolve that much more firm.

I will admit that I had a much greater fear at the time that it would escalate, drawing in other countries (Iran, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, etc.) in a way which really did not happen, and that I had less of a clear sense of why and how the civil war would emerge as the inevitable result of toppling Saddam.

I think you have the right idea about why people aren't asked "why" in surveys: cost, borne of the fact that to ask that question you pretty much need an open-ended answer set. So-called "closed" questions offer every respondent the same set of answer choices, usually with captures for "don't know," "other," and simply refusing to answer. In order to ask people why, you pretty much have to let them talk and tell you why. Which becomes a nightmare afterwards, when you're trying to categorize responses. And that's if you hold them to only ONE answer, as opposed to multiples.

Open-ended questions are a mess, and are fraught with danger when trying to interpret the answers.

As for being against the war before it started--one of the key people who raised my consciousness before invasion was Scott Ritter, who told anyone who would listen that the WMD claims were full of shit. Primarily, I learned from him and through subsequent research that at BEST, the WMD still existing in Iraq were very old and poorly made in the first place--meaning that they essentially didn't have any WMD. And from the NIE excerpts we were privy to at the time, it seemed obvious that while maybe Saddam was hiding some chem-based production plans, there wasn't any real evidence of bio weapons--and as far as nuclear went, it had actually been determined with some authority that there was no nuclear program, period.

So the poor sell of WMDs was one thing. I'm totally against external regime change, for another, not even considering how we had no apparent plan to adequately fill Saddam's vaccuum, politically. I was also heavily skeptical of any al-Qaeda influence beyond the Al-Ansaar group, which was operating outside of Saddam's control.

Finally, there was no authorizing UN resolution.

I was completely opposed from the beginning since war is bad and

1)Iraq was no threat to the US

2) We would get bogged down in an insurrection

3) It would lead to civil war.

My biggest surprise was the complete absence of WMD, I fell for the prewar propaganda on that one.  Also the insurrection and civil war developed more quickly than expected.

Not because we don't know, but from the standpoint of data management, open-ended items really suck.  As a data management professional, I do ANYTHING to get away from them.  

There are a whole bunch of other really fucked-up, truly sucky methods for data collection:

1) Rank-ordering: Idiotic

2. "Select your most important": OK for 2 year olds, no one else
   

What I suggest here is:

1) "Select the three most important"
2) "Select the five most important"

My current interest lies in the following

3) Select all reasons WHICH YOU DO NOT AGREE WITH

We oppose the the war because War Is Ugly.

Perhaps it was winnable if only the experts had been allowed to execute the war with realistic goals rather than the ideo-illogical efforts to pillage the place.

But everything this bunch does turns to shit...

I opposed the Iraq War because I began to suspect we were being lied to about the reasons for the war.  I could not understand why the WMD inspectors in Iraq could not be given more time to look for WMD, given the high cost in lives and treasure that war would bring.  I looked for answers on the internet.  My search brought me to the group "Project For A New American Century."  Many of the members of this group, who had been agitating for war against Iraq for years, had become members of the Bush Administration.  I then knew that the fix was in.

These are terribly depressing results. Apparently the majority of Americans cannot think logically and so decided that it's wholly proper to invade country X because unrelated group Y attacked us a couple of years earlier.

Education reform is needed more than ever in this country. Standardized testing is not the solution.

Because we were attacked on 9/11 by the growing threat of Al Qaeda and all resources should have been focused on capturing Osama Bin Laden and demolishing Al Qaeda.

A preemptive attack and invasion of a nation which had nothing to do with the attack upon our country seemed as logical as attacking Mexico after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor.

this question is the complexity of the answer. Th easy answer is:

It was wrong.

The hard part is that is was wrong for so many reasons that it becomes difficult to quantify.

But we'll start here...

1.They didn't attack us and there was no evidence that they were going to attack us therefore it was wrong for our defense department to engage in offensive actions towards them.

See... I've already gotten into a two pronged answer there. Our military is not suppossed to be an offensive weapon. Their job is to defend our nation. It was a betrayal of long standing American principal to attack Iraq.

2. Iraq was cornered. We had them boxed in already. Saddam wasn't going to do jack. He'd been nailed to the ground for 12 years. However...

... I was really pissed at Daddy Bush for stopping back during GWI. The blockade was not sustainable and it was a guarentee that we would eventually fight GWII. Doesn't mean I think it was right, just inevitable.

If you are gonna fight a damn war, fight the damn war and get it over with. Don't drag it out. Don't minimize it. Don't do it on the cheap. If your standing principle is to not fight unless you have no other choice then when you fight you kick ass as hard and fast as you can. Win it. End it. And move on to reconstruction and a peaceful life for everyone again. Half-assed war is the worst possible scenario for everyone but the defense contractors.

3. Afghanistan was our opportunity to do the right thing. Not only was that where bin Laden was but going in heavy, defeating the Taliban, defeating al Queda, disarming the warlords, and then going in even heavier with security and reconstruction to rebuild Afghan society would have done more to solve the problem of islamic terrorism then anything else we could have done.

Hearts and minds. Stomachs, heads, and feet.

We had the opportunity to show the Muslim world that we were not the great Satan but rather a friend of the Muslim people. The America that is heard of in myth and legend. The one that helped rebuild Germany and Japan and bailed out France and gives generously to NGO's.

It would have ripped the rug right out from under the al Queda argument but instead we got Iraq and strengthened al Queda and fueled anti-America hatred more then they ever could have done on their own.

Iraq was the worst possible action we could have taken.

No, I take that back. Iraq is the second worst. Abandoning our civil liberties here at home is the worst possible action we could have taken.

It was a waste of resources.

Bush fucks everything up.

for it to be meaningful.

Hindsight folks tend to change what might have been their real reason for supporting the war to match events.

http://www.gwu.edu/~action/2004/dean/dea n021703sp.html

Gov Dean articulated many of the reasons I opposed the war.  This speech was given 1 month before the invasion.

Things he did not mention in the speech but in other interviews are:

Other possible consequences  of invading Iraq--66% are Shiites therefore--- possible Islamic Theocracy friendly to Iran.

They are not given respect because the media is corporate owned and  afraid to rile the powers that be in Washigton.  

How can they give respect to the people who were right when they were so wrong?

Trying to remember back, and not putting into my thoughts what I know now, but did not know then:

1.  I semi-believed that they had WMD (not because Bush said so, but because Powell said so), and remember thinking, why would we put our troops in a situation where they would be poisoned?

2.  Much of the rest of the world was opposed, and it didn't feel like something we should take on alone.
   
3.  Iraq society was nothing like the Taliban society, and people in Iraq were educated. If they wanted to get rid of Saddam, surely they were capable of asking the rest of the world for help.
   
4.  We already had one war going, and I remember wanting to see Afghanistan freed.

Terry Olson

One of my major reasons -- probably the top one -- was that I thought we would be stuck there for years with truck bombs going off (i.e., the reason G.H.W. Bush said he did not go to Baghdad in his book).  Yet I'm not sure how that would be classified above... is that reason 1?  

Unlike everbody else in the world, I don't remember with crystal clarity why or how much I opposed the war at its initial stages (that was a lifetime ago for some!).

But my number 1 reason for opposing now is incompetence at the very top...not Condi..not Cheney...not (formerly) Rummy...but the incompetent Legacy Pledge in Chief himself, George Bush.  

The category 'DOESN'T SUPPORT BUSH' doesn't really cover my position.  I could support him til the cows come home but that wouldn't help the fact that the cows would probably come home in flag draped caskets.

I understand and agree with most of what's above, but must add one thing:

There was never any real or honest public discourse about this war, not really.  I "got that" very early on when the drum beats began.  Instead of discourse, anyone who objected was instead attacked.  I remember saying to myself, "Oh! It doesn't matter what I or anyone things about this ... We're going to war anyway!!!"

It was in essense shoved down everyone's throats.

Anyone else have this feeling?  It was as if I (i.e., we the people, the public) were not relevent at all.  

The default position should always be to oppose war.  The people who started this war disagree with this fundamental premise.  So, not only did they fail to make a convincing case as to why the war should be started, their basic immorality about whether war should be an option casually considered makes me think they should be opposed in pretty much any decision regarding warfare.  

All of the pre-war discussions were conducted at a infantile level of fear-mongering.  That alone was reason to oppose the war.  

A lot of people, and the vast majority of the American public, bought into the logical implication
(Iraq hiding WMDs) => We should invade

I categorically reject that implication.  It fails on both accounts: the presmise was easily shown to be false, but even if the premise were true, the idea that the consequence naturally followed was also false.  

But let's be honest here.  The truth of the story is that the war started with people with the following logical framework:

(empty set) => We should invade

They then picked and chose whatever possible premise could be sold to the public, because they had already agreed on the conclusion.  

 1. Pre-emptive war is WRONG and flies in the face of American values.

 2. George W. Bush was neither trustworthy nor competent -- and this was obvious from before the 2000 election.

 3. Saddam Hussein had been successfully muzzled and contained for a decade. He was no threat.

 4. The White House rhetoric supporting the war was empty, slogan-driven, and condescending, revealing no clear thought and analysis -- "we need to free Iraq"? Why not free Equatorial Guinea as well? They're also under a horrible dictatorship. Not to mention that Saudi Arabia's government was (and is) more repressive than Iraq's.

 5. An already established pattern of administration evasiveness and truth-bending -- Cheney's secret meetings with oil executives, the Enron meltdown, the reckless tax cuts even as we were about to mount a major military operation -- it was obvious the Bushies had an agenda in mind that had nothing to do with "freeing" the Iraqi people.

 And about ten more. The common thread: Bush and Cheney were just not credible.

I supported the Iraq war.  That mistake motivates every ounce of political activism I engage in now.

Here's part of a diary I posted on Blue Hampshire responding to why I oppose escalation:

I lost two high school friends on 9/11, and a skyline I had grown up with.  Watching the tragedy unfold up here in NH, I wrongly assumed that the collapse of the first building meant that blocks and blocks of the Wall Street area had been wiped out.  As a former resident of old Manhattan town, this promptly made me hysterical, thinking about all the people I knew who were to die.

My mother lost her former neighbor, the suburbs outside of New York City where I grew up lost scores of policemen, firefighters, port authority workers, and businesspeople.  Just before 9/11, a very close person in my family signed up for the army.

I write that not because it gives any more credence to my beliefs than anyone else; it just provides some context.

Both before and after 9/11 I believed Bush to be stupid, embarrassing, and venal, but despite that impression, I also felt that it is a natural and healthy instinct to trust what our government tells us on matters of great importance.

When the drumbeat for the Iraq war began in the summer of 2002, I listened carefully to what was being said.  As we got closer to March of 2003, I began to feel more and more uneasy at the prospect of going to war with a country that had not attacked us, and which had no relationship to Osama bin Laden.  I did not find Bush or Cheney or Rumsfeld convincing enough to support action.  I did find both Powell's UN presentation, and Tony Blair's eloquence, persuasive.

Just prior to the invasion, I reluctantly gave my support to it based solely on the supposed threat of weapons of mass destruction, again based chiefly on Powell's presentation and the fact that the much smarter sounding head of another country was in support as well.

When it became clear by early June of 2003 that there were no immediate smoking guns of WMD, I felt as if I had been kicked in the stomach.  You know the feeling you get when you suddenly realize that you've casually made a very, very bad decision that will negatively impact you for some time? That was what it felt like. (It was also, incidentally, the time I started to notice the Governor to the west of me be the lone voice of doubt about Iraq I had heard).

How I got to this point in my political activism has that moment as its origin.  I literally wake up every single day feeling ashamed that I once supported the Iraq war (however tentatively and briefly), and I devote what I do towards making good on that terrible mistake.

I opposed the war in Iraq from the moment it was mentioned, for many many reasons.

This was a pre-emptive war. We were not attacked. We attacked Iraq on the (demonstrably false) presumption that we needed to do so to protect U.S. interests.

Some more reasons I opposed the war in Iraq:

*no proof that there was a danger (the falsity of the 'weapons of mass destruction' claims)
*no opportunity for the U.N. inspectors to complete their investigations to see if there was a danger
*no imminent attack on the U.S. or vulnerability of the U.S. that could be prevented by a U.S. attack on Iraq
*suspicious of the Bush Adminisration claims for the war (oil always seemed a more likely reason behind the U.S. war in Iraq)
*Saddam Hussein was put in his position by the U.S. -- so it seemed unlikely that his U.S. facilitators had stopped being involved in his activities
*Iraq had no relationship to the 9/11 destruction, though the Bush Administration continued to make the false claim that the Iraq war was an outgrowth of 9/11
*seemed like a new opportunity to try out fancy war toys and contractors, which were touted as better ways to make war without impacting our U.S. soldiers

I was opposed to the war because there was no reason to invade Iraq other than to remove Hussein and the US isn't in the business of removing evil dictators just because they are evil dictators and if we were then Iraq would not be the first place to go.  Hussein was not a threat and was easily contained.  As far as the other reasons given for invasion at the time these were all demonstrably false.  In particular, WMD's were a non-issue since weapons inspectors were in Iraq weeks before the vote in Congress.

I opposed the war before the Powell Presentation. I examined the photographs published with it. I opposed the war after the Powell Presentation. Bush, Powell, and the other liars claimed that certain photo pairs several months apart showed new construction, but they showed the same buildings, in the same condition. Because one photo was taken in the morning and one photo was taken the afternoon, and one was closer to noon, the two showed different arrangements of shadows, but not of buildings.

I assumed that since they were lying about the C/W 'evidence' they might not have any C/W evidence.  And when inspectors claimed the C/W weapons were destroyed, I believed them, and didn't believe Bush.

I assumed that Saddam Hussein would not repeat the mistakes of 1991, but had stockpiled supplies in the cities and would concentrate forces in the cities. I was wrong about that. The Iraqi army fought in the open and lost.

So the U.S. Army took Baghdad without the several thousand killed I had expected/feared, but without the gas attacks many war supporters and war opponents alike had expected/feared. It would have made sense to declare victory and go home. Instead came the long occupation, handing the country over to Halliburton, shooting some protesters in until-then-peaceful Fallujah, etc.

1. I didn't see THE POINT. I knew that Iraq was the Arab Equivalent of Yugoslavia and that Saddam was its Tito. There was nothing to indicate that he was a threat.

2. We didn't finish the mission in Afghanistan which we COULD directly match to 9-11.

3. If we were going to invade an Arab country for 9-11, then it should have always been SAUDI ARABIA - which gave us 15 out of the 19 hijackers on 9-11.

4. I always thought it was about OIL, which meant hell no to me.

Since when have the American people needed a logical reason to attack a 3rd world country composed of people of color (especially if they have a different religion)?

All you need is a president capable of fear-mongering and demonizing. It's worked again and again. The majority only becomes antiwar much later, when the costs get too high.

Just ask Nicaragua, Panama, Grenada, Angola, Vietnam, Laos, and a few dozen other countries.

Let me rephrase your question in a manner that might help people see how stupid it is:

Why did you want Peace?

War is bad. People are killed, people's bodies and minds are maimed, people's lives are ruined or disrupted, huge sums of money are wasted that could have gone to, say, no-tuition higher education for all. So you avoid war when you can. That's just my moral bottom line, probably instilled by my liberal Christian upbringing.

I was ambivalent about the Afghan war and thought more time and bullying might have made the Taliban cough up bin Laden and company. I figured the administration had a little blood lust to get out of its system. Hah.

I had read about the Middle East in a long travel series in the New Yorker by Milton Viorst. Iraq was quite a modern place by some standards 20 years ago, city people looked Western, lots of women professionals, lots of Christians and a few Jews in good standing, very secular--bin Laden's nightmare! Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden were polar opposites, and it seemed insane to me to attack Iraq on account of al Qaeda--as someone else put it, like attacking Mexico on account of Pearl Harbor.

And then I had a whole lot of other reasons, including most of what everyone else has listed, starting with our need to follow through on Afghanistan, devote resources, and make a good job of patching up the country and getting it going in the right direction.  

Kevin Drum asked that question?

Yes why?  Those Washington pundits are 100% wrong but they get the respect and big bucks and promotion.

And media still consults them for their opinions.  Why?

HIGHEST RESPECT FOR SCOTT RITTER AND BLIX.

Actually, one of the easier decisions in my lifetime.

1. WMD. After all the inspections by the UN inspectors and, knowing that there had to be covert ops ongoing to make the administration's case, the fact there was nothing ever found leads to one of two conclusions:
a) The WMDs didn't exist
b) The Iraqis had done such a marvelous job of burying things that they should be awarded clean-up contracts on our superfund sites.

2. Ties with AQ. The last thing that a dictator like Saddam wants is the presence of a destabilizing force like AQ. I mean, good grief folks, Survivability 101!

For me, opposing the war was not a hunch, or a "gut feel." It was, as Spock would say, "Logical."

After serving 20 years (retired) in the US Navy during the 'cold war', I believe that armed conflict is bad, and should only be used to defend 'direct attacks', either on our country or our allies, by uniformed armed forces directed by foreign governments intent on invasion.  Almost any other scenario should be delt with as a law enforcement matter.  Governments should be delt with diplomatically.

My reason is summed up in my dKos sig line:

"To initiate a war of aggression...is the supreme international crime" - Nuremberg judgment, 1946

If you examine the reasoning of Justice Jackson, you see the reason agressive war was "supreme" among crimes is that it unleashes all the other crimes of war -- murder, rape torture, theft -- when not a last resort.  And once the horrifying forces of modern war are set in motion, no one can predict where they will lead.

Bush's crime of aggressive war against Iraq has demonstrated all this with dismal clarity.

I opposed the whole "war on terror" from 9/11/2001 on -- we were and are confronted by something that needs international cooperative law enforcement and adoption of policies that undermine the impetus that some people feel to commit terrorist acts. A good start would be to FORCE Israel to retreat its 1967 borders, internationalize Jerusalem, and compensate the Palestinians it displaced. Snatching up Bin Laden and trying him is the International Court of Justice wouldn't be a bad idea either. Conducting "targeted killings," assasinations of people somebody says are terrorists, merely makes the problem worse.

I opposed the "war" on Afghanistan which was and is merely mucking around with "our" warlords in preference to Bin Laden's warlords.

I opposed the Iraq war which had NO rational justification that benefited the American people and  which was unequivically an aggressive war under the Nuremberg definitions (despite a coerced UN fig leaf.) As far as I can figure out, we invaded Iraq in order to prove the Dick Cheney and  little boy Bush are unbounded to both national and international rule of law.

It is all very depressing.

Many of the reasons stated above motivated my opposition to this war from Day One.  It seemed glaringly obvious that, in the face of imminent findings by the UN inspection teams that the Hussein regime had no WMDs and did not pose anything even remotely resembling an imminent threat to anyone, Bush's rush to bomb Baghdad was the most transparent of maneuvers.  It seemed obvious to anyone with even a partially-functioning brain that the war was being waged solely to boost Bush's sagging poll numbers and distract the American public from his failures to (a) find and capture those responsible for 9/11 and (b) work on actual measures to make America and the world safer from such attacks.  And yet, we had allegedly intelligent people like John Kerry voting in favor of the AUMF, only to claim later that "we were lied to."  Bullshit!  The complicitors in Congress knew damn well that Bush was lying before they voted--it just wasn't politically expedient for them to oppose the war then.  I don't buy for a second any excuses for supporting this goddamn abomination.  To all latecomers, better late than never, I guess.  Try explaining to your grandkids how you really thought that Saddam was an imminent threat, or how "we all" supported the war at the start.  Sounds a goddamn awful lot like the "good German" defense to me.  Explain to them how you were too busy to learn the truth, how it was too much for you to lift the phone to call your Congressperson to tell them "Hell no!"  Oh well, what's a few thousand dead American troops?  What's a few hundred thousand dead Iraqi civilians?  What's 10,000 or 20,000 orphaned and maimed Iraqi kids?  Weren't they just future "Qaeda" anyway?

Yeah this is a screed.  Sorry.  Ban my ass.  I don't care much at this point, because we're still sitting on our asses, about to let the slaughter get bigger and better, about to be "duped" again--this time with Iran.

One reason that I opposed the Iraq war was my support for the Afghan war. I felt like going to Iraq would be a major distraction from what needed to be done in Afghanistan.

I also thought that the Iraqi people would be much worse off after we decimated their country.

With Afghanistan I thought we were doing the right thing, but in a completely wrong way. The Afghan invasion on the cheap was complete folly. We had a chance to really do some good there. I thought invading Afghanistan was the appropriate respond to Sept 11. Shame that we left it to rot.

There are so many good reasons given here for opposing the war. I opposed it from the first instant because my liar radar was pinging off the scale everytime I heard a talking head saying 'Weapons of Mass Destruction.' I also took a couple of hours to do research on the web about Iraq (including the CIA Factbook) and came to the conclusion that a country with 67% of the population unable to read or write and the number of fighting age men less than the population of Greater New York area was no threat to us. Maybe a deadly nuisance, but not a threat. There was no Iraqi economic base to support any aggression against the US. They had no navy or air force of substance. It didn't add up to anything remotely requiring the US to go to war while the fact that Saddam had announced his intention to switch to Euros for oil surely indicated why the mis-administration was so eager for one. When France and Germany said Thanks, but no Thanks, that sealed the deal.

It was perfectly obvious that the whole thing was 'on the nose' from the start.

I never trusted the Bush administration and the shift of attention to Iraq after 9/11 seemed to have a definite ideological and geopolitical agenda.  I still believe that the war on Iraq was preceded by a 'war' on the UN, and international diplomacy in general, following the mistaken calculus that after the fall of the Soviet Union the US was free to pursue unilateraly whatever international objectives it saw fit - that naked power was a 'morality' in itself.  This was all well understood neo-conservative stuff at the time.

I still believe this war had more domestic than geopolitical purposes; part of an intentional attempt to broaden the powers of the executive branch and then use that power in unprecedented ways.  This seems reinforced by the incompetence of the notion of exporting Western style democracy to Iraq, of all places.  These were not foreign policy experts making these choices; what possible gain could a democratic majority Shi'ite state, even a pliant one, yield when neighbouring Shi'ite Iran was a likely emerging regional power.

But more than anything I was dumbfounded to see the Bush administration playing into the hands of Islamist extremists by polarising the conflict itself. Wasn't that obviously the intention of their movement, to undermine moderate Islamic states by weakening their position of engagement with the West?  When Bush wrapped himself in the flag and announced his 'crusade' I felt the US had reached the nadir of good sense and international relations.

Frankly I was shocked that the MSM and leading Democrats did not stand up to this, or even provide a credible dissenting opinion; one of the reasons I have little sympathy for the discomforture of those now seeking office who are in this category.

I must stress that this all seemed perfectly obvious at the time; there was plenty of contemporary evidence that the WMD and terrorism accusations against Iraq were fabrications.  Remember Scott Ritter? The abuse hurled at France for refusing to support us?

I feel that this remains a litmus test for integrity and have nothing but respect for the few individuals and institutions which did stand fast;  there were precious few of them at the time.

Thanks for asking for my 25 cents:

It is pretty obvious that the roots of terrorism are poverty, ignorance, and general machismo of the dis-enfranchised. The war in Iraq promised to do the wrong thing in all of these dimensions.
 - Make 'em poor by blowing up their infrastructure
 - Keep 'em ignorant by destroying their economy some more
 - Keep them ashamed by being a bigger badder bully.

There was no way that doing the exactly wrong thing would somehow come out right. Also, the sense that the Iraq war was somehow connected with some kind of spirit of revenge, in addition to oil greed, should have given everyone pause.

I helped plan No Iraq War protests daily and weekly.

Major reasons given by our neighborhood group that met weekly to plan neighborhood walks and vigils and watch Bill Moyers Friday TV show together: (All were furious readers about war plans, constitutional law, and Iraq & U.S. social political economic history.)

1) It's wrong to invade and occupy another country. International treaties that we have signed forbid it. Iraq was not engaging us in a border skirmish, was not parking battleships off our coast.  (We didn't invade and occupy the USSR because they had submarines off our coast).

2) Any treaties ratified by the Senate have the force of law and can't be abandoned by a president's desire. Bush would have to break the law to invade Iraq.

3) Bush was lying and hiding his reasons for wanting to invade Iraq. He didn't make a legal case for war. Bush had no respect for the law or the people's will. The majority of the populous at the time opposed the invasion of Iraq but Bush had no respect for the will of the people.

4) Whatever his reasons, he didn't have the authority to invade and occupy another country. The united Nations didn't support invasion and the congressional resolution in October didn't give it, we believed. Many in our group began working on inpeachment issues. Other went ot work on presidential campaigns of Dean or Kucinich or Clark.

Why I opposed the war:

two words
Scott Ritter

He continually called it.

When he mentioned that the Marines were being forward deployed he said there was no doubt we were going into Iraq.

Until proven otherwise he's been the gold standard.

v.

Interesting topic. I was against it in the first place mainly for the following:

I believed Saddam was contained. He had no capability to threaten any nation because of a decade of inspections and air strikes.

I believed it was a diversion from Afghanistan (which I supported) and the wider terrorist threat. Indeed I thought we would be playing directly into the hands of OBL by creating more terrorists.

It was against international law. I would have grudgingly accepted it if the UN had agreed.

I didn't and do not trust George W. Bush and his neo-con cohorts.

I am quite frankly bewildered that we on the left are still considered by many as being 'weak' on National Security when events have proved us right at every step of this mess while the Bushies have continued to screw it up at every turn. How can they continue to say that we don't care about the troops when rather than add more sitting ducks to be shot at and blown up we would actually get them out of harms way?

Lots of good comments on the "whys and why nots" of support for the war.  I'd like, though, to make a couple of observations about your general interpretations of the poll results.

"This poll appears to indicate that most people who support / supported the war just wanted to do something in response to 9/11 to protect themselves from future terrorism, even if that terrorism didn't have WMDs. Even people who  supported the war didn't buy into, or at least care quite as much about, either freedom in Iraq or any weapon stockpiles Hussein may or may not have had."

I think this pretty well sums up the general attitude of people here in my little red corner of Ohio.  People here were, and still are, pissed as hell about what happened on September 11 (who isn't??) and just wanted "to do something".  To them it doesn't have to be logical, make sense or be even legally justifiable to anyone.  It doesn't really even need to be the actual party involved in the attacks.  They just want to kick some ass.  And who better than those dark skinned,  fanatically religious, prayer chanting foreigners who "hate our way of life".
That is truly the attitude of whole lot of people down here.  It is a "soft bigotry" that exists here but it is very evident all the same.  They like it and truly believe that we're "killing them in Iraq so we don't have to kill them over here".  

So I think your conclusions are pretty accurate, especially as relating to this part of the country.  It really didn't matter to them who we hit, as long as it was somebody we already have a subconscious dislike for.  Somebody different, preferably Middle Eastern.  So that's what they got, right or wrong, and here we are today.  A party to the killing of tens or hundreds of thousands of people in a country which had nothing to do with September 11.  All to satisfy our testosterone saturated impulses developed through all those years of cultivating the "white hat/black hat" cowboy mentality we Americans love so much.

A truly American psychosis.  We are a better people than this.  We have proven it in the past  and I hope we have a future in which we can make amends for our recent flirtations with this madness.