Going to war against a militia totally embedded within the Shia population would be a little bit awkward, not to mention going to war against the democratically-elected Iraqi government.

http://the-ts-maven.blogspot.com

I think that a lot of different policy constituencies had a lot of legitimate but separate reasons for invading Iraq. The neocons, imo, believed that the US needed to drastically enlarge its Mideast footprint (aka: destroy regimes that were, in various nefarious ways, subverting US interests, and turn those states into client states) in order to alter the Mideast’s strategic equilibrium, that Mideastern Islam essentially blamed the US for its failings and was exporting lots of terrorism. Iraq, although it was not the biggest threat to the US, was the best target for how easily it was perceived to be occupied and remolded–it had the best perceived cost/benefit ratio. NK was never really on the table because South Korea was adamantly opposed to that idea–cf the poll that showed an overwhelming majority of SK youth would side with NK over the US in the event of a US invasion of NK. Iran would be logistically impossible and strategically difficult without Iraq as a staging area. And except for how easy they perceived Iraq to be–probably correct relative to NK, maybe wrong relative to Iran, but totally wrong in a material, absolute sense–the neocons were right.

The neos, in their quest to rally others to that cause, found that WMD were a great tool in roping in independents and national security conservatives; I think foreign-policy neocons simply felt that marketing their real rationale for invasion was 1) way too complicated, and 2) subverting the ultimate goal of a bigger Mideast footprint (it could, fairly accurately, be characterized as imperialism both by American doves and Iraqi resistance fighters).

Once it was obvious that WMD had gotten a critical mass of followers, everyone else, from econs (free-market democracy laboratory) to theocons (humanitarianism) to half the Democrats in the Senate (political paralysis), jumped in by herd instinct if they weren’t convinced outright.

Remember–even as it became more and more obvious that Iraq had no WMD, support never collapsed until it was clear that the overall effort would fail. People who are now blaming everything on Bush misleading them with WMDs are just looking for an excuse to bolt for the door, and salve their bleeding credibility, before the rest of the herd does.

I think not. We went into Iraq for a number of reasons related to the necessity to remove Saddam Hussein from power. Having done so, we foolishly chose to replace him with a democracy but we need not have done so and it was not our goal or justification for invasion. That is why many dictatorships that do not sufficiently threaten our security interests continue to rule. I suspect that we may be less impatient to see democracy established in the next country we invade.