> I'm not really sure I've been propounding "conspiracy theories," since mostly I've been focusing on just one person.

An important thing to remember is that although Bush is pretty much unquestionably the guy that pushed this war through, he had bipartisan support from Congress. It was only later that the Democrats withdrew their support and started trying to make people forget they had ever sung a different tune. Kerry, to his credit, did not deny his support of the war during the '04 campaign, despite positioning himself opposite Bush's stance on every conceivable detail about the way it was conducted.

The fact that Bush had support from Congress doesn't inherently mean the war was right, but it means psychoanalyzing the President to explain the motivation for the war doesn't really cut it.

The other thing is, I think the right thing can be done for the wrong reasons. Moreover, I think it's entirely conceivable that the *actual* reasons could be different from the reasons the government used to sell the war to the public.

I have to agree with you that liberating the Iraqi people was certainly not the emphasized purpose for the war in the early stages, despite Darien's very good point about what the operation was codenamed. That doesn't mean liberating the Iraqi people *wasn't* actually the reason, though, or at least a major reason. I don't know that it was, either; I'm just saying that citing the government's sales pitch isn't necessarily conclusive. You can't be suspicious of politicians *and* take what they say at face value.

Personally, I think our government honestly believed there were WMDs. I'm not so sure there weren't any, either, and Saddam just got them out in time. I'm not sold on that conclusion; it's just a thought. But whether he had them or not, this much is unquestionable: he was in blatant violation of U.N. rulings, and as a man who has previously proven himself dangerous to at least that part of the world, that was Not A Good Thing. The U.N. should be thanking the U.S. for saving its own face, given how unwilling the U.N. was at enforcing its own rule. Moreover, Saddam violated U.N. rulings in ways that don't even make sense unless he *did* have WMDs. Maybe he didn't have them and just wanted to be a snot about it all, but certainly that only reinforced our sense that Saddam posed a real, global threat.

In any case, whatever the reasons for the war, I think good came of it. We took out a corrupt regime headed by a guy who has used chemical weapons on his own people, invaded another nation to plunder its oil and coastline, and set fire to the oil wells when it turned out he couldn't have them. The world isn't safe having a guy like that in power. The greater mistake was not the second Gulf War, but that the first Gulf War didn't finish the job in the first place.