Do we simply forget about all the vile things we said about the French and Dominique de Villepin for being one of the strong voices of the UN Security Council opposing our wishes and questioning our evidence?

We were talking about boycotting French products, changing the name of "French fries," bakery goods, and salad dressings. Republican representative Ginny Brown-Waite (R-FL) even proposed digging up American WW-II graves and taking the bodies out of French soil. We might have been on the verge of another Archie Bunker show with Meathead as a Frenchman and "the dingbat" as a poodle breeder. We did everything but return to the Hornblower days of calling Frenchmen frogs.

We knew better. We knew Saddam Hussein was a threat to the free world. We knew he had tons of chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction ready to unleash upon us. We knew he had a nuclear program and would gladly build these devastating weapons for his buddies, Osama bin Laden and the al Qaeda. Donald Rumsfeld assured us that we even knew where these weapons were stashed and ready to be turned on us in as little as 45 minutes.

After years of bombing the northern and southern "no fly" zones, we were now flying bombing missions into the middle ground of Iraq to take out or disrupt their communications network. We had no less than five aircraft carriers as close to Iraq as they could get and thousands of troops in Kuwait twiddling their thumbs. And we had General Tommy Franks in Qatar (which we pronounced as "cutter") playing computer simulation games to coordinate the invasion.

We were ready to deliver "shock and awe" that was a plan to use more explosives than were used in the entire Second World War with 48 hours of hell in Baghdad. Just the thought of it was hopefully enough to make the Iraqi people turn on their leader, give him up to us, or run him out of the country. President Bush kept saying "all he has to do is leave the country" and there will be peace.

There was no time to wait. The crisis was imminent. We tired of listening to Hans Blix and his crews deliver ambiguous statements about not finding weapons of mass destruction yet. With the potential of something worse than 9/11 staring us in the face, there was no time to wait for the UN National Security Council to come around, to appreciate all the misinformation we had already given them.

With more than 70 percent of the people of every nation in the world against us, including the populations of our staunchest allies, on March 19th President Bush issued the order to attack.

It has now been more than four months since our boys overran the pipsqueak nation of 23 million unhappy people in a three week war that encountered little resistance other than the depleted uranium dust we left behind last time and were reintroducing this time.

As for weapons of mass destruction, the very reason for the invasion, 250,000 American troops plus ten or twenty thousand allies have found absolutely nothing—zero, zip, zilch, nada, squat, the big goose egg.

The man who supposedly "gassed his own people" didn't use a single chemical or biological agent against an invading enemy. No burning oil fields. No labyrinths of nuclear development under palaces. No credible mobile chemical units found. Nothing.

Not even a trace of the weapons of mass destruction including the ones UN inspectors claim they destroyed before 1998 when Scott Ritter, our own chief UN inspector, told us President Clinton pulled the inspectors out of Iraq so he could bomb some twenty or more locations where these things had already been destroyed. Remember the green lights?

Of course, now we know that we made the horrible mistake of hiring a convicted child molester to represent us on the UN inspection team. Tysk, tysk, someone should be made to stand in the corner for awhile.

What do the war hawks propose now? Today they are running around Washington like Chicken Little claiming that the weapons of mass destruction will eventually show up—just give us more time to find them. Sound familiar?

Isn't that what the French wanted? More time to send more inspectors into Iraq before we had all this bloodshed and destruction?

To make matters even worse, the powers in Washington now want the support and involvement of NATO or the UN to bring law and order to Iraq. Our boys are having to act as police to put down looting and are being killed daily by Iraqis we are trying to write off as leftover loyalists to Saddam's Baath party—not the truly liberated Iraqis who might think we acted unjustly or killed their women and children.

What we really want is other nations to send troops to help us restore order before we have to resort to the same kind of things Saddam did, and we need monetary help because George W. Bush is sending our national debt to the moon.

After telling these other nations to stick it, that we're going it alone, starting an invasion under false pretenses, we are now asking for their help. How far do you think that's going to get us?

The ultimate in arrogant Americanism is asking countries where almost all of their people were against our invasion to now come up with some cash to help us out. That ought to go over like a lead ballon.

The French certainly have a lot of experience with underground activity. They used it effectively when occupied by the Nazis and maybe they could give us some help in dismantling those in Iraq. But then, we've already chided them with jokes about how we had to rescue them from Hitler. And don't forget, it was the French who had the sense to pull out of Viet Nam and leave that quagmire to us.

And let's not forget that Germany was just as adamantly against and outspoken about our intended invasion of Iraq, but we didn't make any snide remarks or tell jokes about the Germans. How come? Were we afraid that it might invite comparisons between George W. Bush and Adolph Hitler from a nation experienced and capable of recognizing the symptoms of fascism in its various stages of development?