I guess I have a classic Canadian perspective on this.
If you want peace you should be willing to meet war with war. But that has been used as an excuse to start wars which otherwise would not have happened. So peaceful countries have to launch peacemaking campaigns jointly, through international organizations.
The US (unlike Canada -- grrrr) is one of few nations willing to put their own people´s lives on the line (not to mention spend billions of dollars) to stop aggression elsewhere. Though North America´s reliance on oil makes me suspicious as to why Iraq is the US´s next target, I am impressed that Bush went through the UN. The UN should now puts its money (wait, that´s mostly UN money too!

) where its mouth is: If Iraq has failed to comply with the resolution, the Security Council should back the US to the hilt and so should the US´s allies.
Just a thought: More Somalias might have given the US more support than it´s getting now. America took a moral stand when it intervened in Somalia; it had no strategic interests there. That was the right thing to do and it deserved more praise than it got, especially from its own people. If there had been more Somalias, fewer people could question the US´s desire to remove a warmongering dictator in the Middle East.
Other opinions welcome, of course
- Rob