It is an outrage that this is not receiving any coverage here in the States:

In a startling break with the official White House and Downing Street lines, Mr Perle told an audience in London: "I think in this case international law stood in the way of doing the right thing."

President George Bush has consistently argued that the war was legal either because of existing UN security council resolutions on Iraq - also the British government's publicly stated view - or as an act of self-defence permitted by international law.

But Mr Perle, a key member of the defence policy board, which advises the US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, said that "international law ... would have required us to leave Saddam Hussein alone", and this would have been morally unacceptable.

There is a word for this--vigilantism. In every State in the Union, it is punished by law in accordance with the actions taken by the perpetrator, regardless of the greater good they were trying to accomplish. This is necessary in order to preserve the rule of law; vigilantes are not accountable to anyone, and cannot be relied upon to respect a suspect's constitutional rights, or apply the law fairly and evenly. I shouldn't even have to explain this--it ought to be self-evident. Apparently, it is not so to these people.

Vigilantism, in the long run, does more harm to the community and to peaceful order than it does good. Respect for the law is diminished, because anyone can claim the right to break the law if they are doing it to serve some greater good. This is even more crucial in international affairs, where international law largely consists of those strictures to which nations mutually agree to abide by.

So what is the product of this kind of policy? By declaring to the world by our actions that we have the right to act in defiance of international law when we believe it serves a greater good, we have given /every other country on earth/ the green light to do the same thing. Because we have shown that we consider UN resolutions a convenience of diplomacy that can be ignored if we don't get our way, other countries will now do the same. Because we have attacked, invaded, and occupied a sovereign country in defiance of international law based on a perceived future threat, mark my words, other countries will follow the precedent we have set.

The people in this administration who pushed this war are criminals. They belong in prison, not in the White House.