My practice is only a stone's throw (medium sized stone, choose one with a rough texture for an easy grip, use an overhand cast—you learn about these things growing up in Ulster) from the border with the Republic of Ireland, and was particularly hard hit by the Troubles. Deprivation, unemployment, and despair were a lethal cocktail, and after seeing so many young lives wrecked I am a confirmed pacifist. Violence begets violence, and perceived injustice and repression is the best recruiting programme any paramilitary organisation could desire.
I know too little about the Iraq war for my opinion to be worth anything; it doesn't help that I don't believe anything I read any more. I have learnt from my experience in Ulster that anyone close enough to the situation to really know what's going on is too close to be objective, while anyone distant enough to be objective is also too distant to really know what's going on. An informed yet objective opinion is rare, and when it does appear is impossible to pick out against all the other plausibly argued but unbalanced opinions.
Saddam was obviously not a benevolent ruler, and just because there are so many other tyrannical regimes in the world doesn't mean it wasn't right to terminate this one. But it's an ill wind; prosperous godfathers were a feature of the Troubles in Ireland as well, and, as usual, in Iraq those who pulled the first trigger were sitting safely with scarlet majors at the base.
Hypothetically the man who declares war should be the first one over the top. Dealing death is much more antiseptic when you are thousands of miles away; you don't actually understand what it is you do, you don't see a young man's head exploding, you don't smell burnt flesh, you don't comprehend the thousands of individual tragedies.
I may know little about Iraq, but practising medicine in Ulster has given me some hard-earned insight into the cause and cure of terrorism; I've seen too many of those individual tragedies at painfully close quarters. The only true war on terror will be a war on poverty, ignorance, and injustice. It will be a long war, and it won't be a war that will make viewer-friendly headlines on CNN, but it is the only war which will have any chance of success.