Wilf - Are you wondering why the Israelis can't fire 155mm artillery into Palestinian towns at will? I really doubt it is the U.S. holding the IDF back, perhaps you should ask them.

Bill - Can you cite a single serious example of the "losers" taking the "winners" to trial? Where has this happened where the so-called "winners" didn't deserve it? Do you think that, say, the Bosnian Serbs are being unjustly persecuted for the "battle" of Srebrenica? Or perhaps the Hutu supremacist FAR shouldn't face any consequences for their counterinsurgency "techniques"? Or maybe we need to take a second look at Charles Taylor's record from a more understanding perspective. And I don't know why everyone hated on Saddam Hussein - don't people understand that the Kurds and Shiites were violent too? After all, Saddam's tactics really brought the whole Kurdish-Arab conflict to a swift end --- if we'd just allowed him to "finish the job" back in 1991, we wouldn't even be talking about a Kirkuk problem now, would we?