<Pardon me if I may,
Why can't Dubya blast his death ray
On only Saddam rather than say
On starving innocents who happen to be in the way?

An excellent question. In my opinion, the ideal way to fight a war like this where the key element is a dictator, is to simply pop a cap on him. Yeah, he's hard to find, but if we started vectoring a few tens of billions of defense dollars into high-tech assassination techniques, I bet we could figure something out.

Naturally, this is against all the Rules of Warfare, which are made by world leaders who, for obvious reasons, do not want to set a general precendent of waxing world leaders in a conflict. That's what the cannon fodder is for, while the leaders stay in the bunkers and move little models around.

We plug Saddam, and if we don't like the next dictator, we plug him until we get someone we do like. Naturally, they will try to plug our leadership back. Democracies, interestingly, are not as vulnerable to this kind of thing since ideally, they are relatively insensitive as to who's in charge. When it comes down to it, the United States could run quite well without a President--at least a specific President--or most of Washington D.C. for that matter. It goes without saying that this is not something with which America's leadership would agree.