Yes, and it was about to go belly up. Did you expect policing of the no-fly zones forever? Do you think lifting sanctions would have made no difference to arms escalation and restart of weapons programs?

Does 'AQ Khan' not mean anything to you?

No putative cooperation between Al-Qaeda and the Saddam regime . . .? Read the 9/11 Report.

I hope the US stays there for many years. It's perfectly positioned to influence events in Syria and Iran and the region as a whole -- and that was a covert reason for the invasion for sure.

Q: What do these flourishing democracies and world-leading economies have in common: Germany, Japan, South Korea?
A: Long-term American bases.

It was a brave and far-sighted decision to invade Iraq and one for which the US should be congratulated and which will be of great influence on the values cherished by the liberal left.

Whatever happened to 'fighting fascism', a cornerstone of traditional leftist values? The left has been taken over by anti-war wonks with touchy feely values and no long-term analytical skills.

What an intellectually overprivileged fantasy.

News flash, Lars: Saddam and his psycho (or, as I prefer to say, "evil") kids had been running Iraq for many years before the invasion, and there was no reality-based reason to imagine that anything terribly different was going to happen.

Twice, Saddam got frisky - once with Iran, leading to a bloody stalemate, and once with Kuwait, where he got his ass handed to him on a platter. You can count Osirak as a third, if you like, with the same kind of result.

Everything we've learned about the regime since its fall, which gave us access to all sorts of archives and to insiders who would've been too scared to speak while Saddam was in power, indicates that Saddam was a caged tiger, and knew it.

But by all means, enjoy your fantasies, as they doubtless make the American and Iraqi deaths since "Mission Accomplished" seem well worth the cost. If I'd supported this foolish war, I'd feel those deaths on my conscience, too.

Yes, yes. It really is all because we hate Bush. It's really just this inexplicable hatred of this man which has caused us to see the truly strategic blunder on a scale that boggles the imagination. it's the irrational despising which has colored our understanding that there never was any WMD, never was any Al Qaeda connections, and more importantly, it was our inexplicable loathing of the boy moron that pulled the wool over our eyes and made us see the ethnic splits in the Iraqi society that would cause horrific bloodshed and civil war. And then to top it off, it was this insane contempt for our emperor that kept us seeing the spectacular failures of an occupation that wasn't even planned and was carried out by neocon idealists who couldn't even tie their shoes, much less reconstruct a government or rebuild an infrastructure.

Thanks much for pointing all this out to us intellectually underprivileged. Truly, GWB is the hand of fate and did only what was inevitable and right.

Saddam and his psychopathic sons and the rest of the Baath Party fascists would have been an ongoing catastrophe -- with consequences of a magnitude of which we cannot imagine -- but which would have inevitably increased the chaos in the region and probably the rise of Islamic fundamentalism, including potential covert weapons transfer.

Yes. He really does make it pretty easy - and effective - to do. Too bad he's like a boat anchor around McCain's neck going into November, eh?

"Duh, George Bush, duh"

I believe Colin Powell also, except I believe the Powell Doctrine, which was supposed to be a distillation of everything we learned in Vietnam:

-Have a clear mission.

-Go in with overwhelming force.

-Have an exit strategy.

-Have the support of the American people.

I guess Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld really didn't buy into Powell's doctrine. I guess we really didn't learn much from Vietnam after all. And I guess we'll be in Iraq longer than we were in Vietnam.

George Santayana got it right in 1905: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it". What is amazing is how quickly we forgot.

There was certainly a lot of "after the fact" repositioning as things went sour. But as far as I can tell, even with numbers that the war supporters will agree to (conservative estimates, by any measure) I'm pretty sure we've dramatically surpassed even the most outrageous claims of deaths caused by Saddam.

Given that, five years on, there's still hardly an infrastructure to speak of - electricity hardly on and spotty at best, water infra still in tatters, economy in shambles running over 50% rate of unemployment, not to mention the fact that the political infrastructure is essentially non existent - it's hard to imagine exactly what - on balance - the humanitarian case was/is for the Iraq war.

While there’s no question that there was a humanitarian argument for going to war in Iraq and that it comprised a key element of President Bush’s speeches to the nation

James,

Since there is "no question' about this, can you provide some metrics to support it? Cause that's not really the way I remember things.

I think that whole framing is fallacious. When you destroy someone's home, for example, you don't "buy" it. You don't "own" it. What you do is pay recompense. If you kill a child of someone's family, you don't "own" them. You pay them recompense and provide endless apologies for an act you can never repay.

To frame this as we "own" Iraq because we "broke" it is to buy into the whole argument that we have to stay there because we "own" it. If we broke it by doing such horrific damage, it's quite reasonable to suggest that we politely leave and provide recompense for our actions which have caused all this to happen in the first place, and to endlessly apologize for something we can never repay.

If some idiot came storming through my property, killing a large percentage of my family accidentally while trying to catch some bad guys, the absolute *last* thing on earth I'd like him to do would be to hang around forever, doing even more damage and killing even more people. At a minimum, I'd want him out of there while I try to pick up the pieces. Preferably, on his dime.

To say that Iraq is "ours to fix" is the height of hubris - and that's relative to the incredible hubris it took to invade a country that didn't threaten us in any way in a mad plan to "democratize" them.

We're a bunch of idiots and the sooner we get out and let them fix this themselves, the better off they'll be. Sure, we have a responsibility that will be with us for endless decades, given the mess we've made. But it does not follow that correct action for us to take is to stay there endlessly, compounding the problem endlessly.

Which, oddly enough was what the Democrats have been wanting us to do, isn't it? I mean, it worked so well the first thousand times, huh?

And we can’t know what evils would have occurred had we not entered. But we’re at least partly to blame for those have happened following our invasion.

Your entire peice seems to ignrore the evils which were already occurring which were stopped as a result of our action.... which as Hitch suggests, must count for something.