Read Tim Dunlop’s take on what it means to be part of the coalition of the willing.
The administration can mouth it a 1000 times (they will), they can add names and numbers to a meaningless list (they will), they’ll find countries to help clean up the mess, and this will still be the coalition of George and Tony.
And, one blog earlier Tim links to this dialogue on the casus belli.

Josh Marshall suggests in this article that it may not be quite as easy as some think to transform Iraq into a democratic pro western government:

a low death toll is key to convincing Iraqis and the rest of the Arab world that we are liberators, not conquerors or destroyers. In short, it’s key to making our invasion seem like a good thing.
But that’s the catch. Occupying armies will always keep things under control in the short-term. But the sort of transformation we engineered in the former Axis powers required a far greater pliancy, one which allowed us not only to disarm these countries but rewrite their textbooks, reorient their politics, and do much more.
Doing that in a foreign country may require a mauling of the civilian population that we are rightly unwilling to undertake.

Thanks to Mike Silverman at Red Letter Day for the link to Michael Totten’s blog on Our Common Humanity.

the talking dog is in an educational mode today. Jump over there to find links to a handfull of articles that may make you a little uncomfortable with the current US direction.