Analgesic said:
...none of which remotely justify a preemptive war. He was not in the midst of invading anyone, let alone an American ally. He was not actively threatening America with biological weapons. And he was nowhere close to having nukes.
Actually, we had been at war with him throughout both Clinton administrations, bombing one target or another on a daily basis, and getting shot at my their missiles. I wonder what happened to everyone's memories--Bush II and his people were talking regime change from the get-go. We believed what every intelligence service in the world believed, which is, that he had an ongoing WMD program. The reason we believed that was because of the constant intercepted chatter about it among Iraqi leaders. So, either the WMD were evacuated to Saddam's fellow Ba'ath friends in Syria, or the WMD did not really exist, but that his own people were telling him the program was ongoing to keep from being tortured to death, as he was in the habit of having done.
Taking out Saddam was no mistake. Staying to nation buildi was. We should not have disbanded the Iraqi army, but should have found a general that was not too bad, gave him the keys, and re-deployed to Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.
Since JFK, we have had this vision of nation building, because his generation was able to do that in Germany and Japan. So far, it seems as if that experiment has worked, but the circumstances were drastically different from Iraq or any other nation-building building effort we have tried.
The simple fact is that a Western-style democracy, (including protections for minorities and NOT including an Islamic theocracy) does not exist in the Islamic world, has not existed in the Islamic world, and is unlikely to ever exist in the Islamic world. Victory in Iraq will be when the Iraqis achieve some modicum of political practicality and they tell us they are ready to deal with the insurgency. Note, nearly every Muslim nation has at least one insurgent group and an ongoing campaign of violence.