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1. The US was breaking big rules by attacking Iraq.
Individual states, like the US, are not authorized by law to determine who is breaking the law, and are forbidden by law to attack other countries without authorization from the UN Security Council, except "in self-defence if an armed attack occurs." Even if the US had been acting under the UN Security Council's authorization (it was not), establishing permanent domination by one country over another is always illegal, because it violates the stated purpose of the UN. The US's conquest of Iraq set out from the start to establish mechanisms of permanent US dominance over Iraq, including building permanent US military bases on Iraqi soil, controlling Iraqi airspace (something it had already done for 12 years, but expanded after the conquest with remote-controlled drones flown by pilots in Las Vegas, spying on and killing the Iraqi citizens for resisting US domination), and setting up a new "Iraqi" police and military that would be controlled by the US military, and whose job would be not to defend Iraq from external powers but to (again) kill Iraqis who resisted US domination; these mechanisms of permanent domination would have been illegal even if the UNSC had authorized the attack, because they make Iraq into a nonsovereign country.
2. Other people had tried to stop the US from breaking big rules by attacking Iraq.
The US's attack on Iraq was opposed by most people in other countries who were polled. Other members of the UN Security Council had tried to get the US to stop, and veto-wielding members of the Security Council made it clear they would refuse to give UN Security Council authorization.
3. The US had been breaking big rules in Iraq for a long time prior to its current attack.
The US had been attacking Iraq for years, in violation of international law, UN Security Council (UNSC) resolutions, and the expressed opinions of the other members of the UNSC. It had used the inspectors for spying purposes that were not related to their inspections job but were instead intended to probe the Iraqi government's security weaknesses. It had then used this illegally-obtained information in illegal attacks on Iraq. (The US was already occupying part of Iraq, illegally, prior to the war.) It had even angered other members of the absurdly compliant UNSC by blatantly violating the UNSC's expressed commands. The US Central Intelligence Agency had been supporting al-Wifaq, an organization that was engaging in terrorism inside Iraq, setting off explosions (even Kenneth Pollack's The Threatening Storm, a propaganda book written to encourage Americans to attack Iraq, admits this, although he doesn't call it terrorism and he doesn't imply that it's a bad thing).
4. Other people had been trying to stop the US from breaking big rules in Iraq prior to its current attack.
While it is true that the UN Security Council had not taken the strong steps that one might have expected given the UN charter's prohibition of acts of aggression like the ones committed by the US against Iraq, there certainly had been attempts by UNSC members to stop the US from continuing its illegal acts. The US's violations and subversions of the Iraq rules had angered other members of the UN Security Council and had blatantly violated the UN Security Council's expressed commands. Other Security Council members had expressed anger at the US for its acts. The US government's collusion with UNSCOM inspector chief Richard Butler went directly against UN Security Council orders.
5. The US had been hurting a lot of people in Iraq prior to its current attack.
The UN sanctions that the US was imposing on Iraq killed hundreds of thousands of people. The US had attacked Iraq from the air hundreds of times, hurting many people. The US sponsored terrorists inside Iraq that were blowing things up and killing people. One of these terrorists was Ayad Allawi, the man that the US later selected to be the head of the first regime that the US created to make it look like Iraq was an independent country.
6. Other people had been trying to stop the US from hurting a lot of people in Iraq prior to its current attack.
Other people had tried to get the US to stop pressuring the UN to maintain the sanctions that were killing so many Iraqis. These other people included other countries. Several top UN officials in Iraq resigned in protest against the sanctions. Even the absurdly compliant UN Secretary General, Kofi Annan, a man who owed his very job to the US-engineered ouster of the former UN head, was trying to get the US to allow them to be dropped. Note that this entire discussion ignores the all-important issue of how it is that the US, nominally just a country on the Security Council, had so much power in what was ostensibly a body made up of sovereign states.
7. The US had been helping "those bad people" to hurt those people, when they were hurting them. The US was sponsoring the Iraqi government's killings until Iraq's 1990 invasion of Kuwait.
For an example of this, click here.
8. The US went to Iraq to replace its government, not to make its government obey the rules.
9. The US's decision to invade Iraq was not made as a last resort, as a response to bad behavior by Iraq.
The US's plan to conquer Iraq in the spring of 2003 was made long before. The US had been trying to get Iraq to disobey the rules anyway, to give it an excuse to conquer the country.
10. The US had not been trying to get Iraq to obey the rules. The US had been trying to get Iraq to lose its temper and reject the inpections. It had used the inspectors to stage provocations to try to force a conflict with Iraq. It had openly said that it would not allow the sanctions to be lifted even if Iraq complied, even though the law said that if Iraq complied it would have the sanctions lifted.
For a good overall picture of the way that the US used the UN inspectors for illegal activity, to try to create provocations, and other ways that the US tried to dominate, manipulate, and mislead the UN inspectors, see Scott Ritter's Iraq Confidential. Ritter was an American soldier who was sent by the US to work on the UN inspection team, but then exposed the crimes and falsehoods of the US with regard to the inspections.
11. The US did want to invade Iraq. The US had wanted to replace Iraq's government for years, and had said so publicly. The US had been trying to engineer a conquest of Iraq for a long time, and lying about Iraq's weapons. Iraq was a wonderful prize for the US; conquering it was not an onerous duty, but a joy.