How does nationalizing healthcare make it cheaper? Does money then appear magically out of thin air to pay for it?
Anyways, back on topic
Please ask the guy you quote to back up his 'facts' with something a little more concrete than hearsay - it is well-known that Saddam gassed villages of Kurds in northern Iraq.
Here's something by Andrew Sullivan that might explain a bit better:
A Just War - The morality of ousting Saddam []
But can the war be legitimate without the sanction of the U.N.? Of course it can be. Traditional just war theory leaves the responsibility for grave decisions like these to the relevant authorities, i.e. the parties to the dispute and the countries planning on taking action. We do not live under a world government. We live under a system in which nation states wield authority, in cooperation with one another. A coalition of the willing - a majority of the states in Europe, the U.S., Britain and other countries - easily qualifies as a legitimate source of authority for launching war.
Is there a credible alternative? Well, there is one obvious alternative to war: continuation of economic sanctions on Iraq. But these sanctions have long been abused by Saddam to allow him to finance his weapons programs, while leaving thousands of Iraqis, including children, to starve or die for lack of good medical care. Is it moral to allow this intense suffering to continue indefinitely while we congratulate ourselves for giving "peace" a chance? We have long been told that these sanctions have resulted in the deaths of countless thousands of innocents, including children. Is it more moral to maintain that horror rather than to try and win a quick war to depose Saddam, free the Iraqi people from tyranny and end the sanctions?
War is an awful thing. But it isn't the most awful thing. No one disputes the evil of Saddam's brutal police state. No one doubts he would get and use weapons of mass destruction if he could. No one can guarantee he would not help Islamist terrorists get exactly those weapons to use against the West or his own regional enemies. No one disputes that the Iraqi people would be better off under almost any other regime than the current one - or that vast numbers of them, including almost every Iraqi exile, endorses a war to remove the tyrant. If we can do so with a minimun of civilian casualties, if we do all we can to encourage democracy in the aftermath, then this war is not only vital for our national security. It is a moral imperative. And those who oppose it without offering any credible moral alternative are not merely wrong and misguided. They are helping to perpetuate a deep and intolerable injustice.
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