<She believes that we will free the oppressed Iraqis. What she doesn't say, is the possibility of blowback from our doing it. After all, shouldn't the Muslims be liberating their own Muslims?

I'd love to see one time in history where Muslims liberated anyone. The Iraqi people can't very well liberate themselves when Saddam has all the weapons and is so willing to use them against his own people.

Why should we be stepping into a cesspool of American hatred in the Middle East and risk everything?

So, you propose letting a mass murderer continue his dirty work just because a lot of people in the area don't like us? A lot of people in Germany and Japan didn't like us, either. We and our allies went in there and stopped their mass murders and genocide. Sometimes, you have to do the right thing even if it is unpopular.

It's not about WMD, oh no.
There are plenty of operatives in the middle of the weapons deals floating around to every dictator, terrorist group and "enemy' of the United States to be a bigger "threat" to us.

I honestly have no idea what you're trying to say here. Saddam was proved to have chemical weapons programs and he used them on both the Iranians and on his own people. He had a proven biological weapons program back in the 1990s. He was caught trying to develop nuclear weapons before and has provided no information (as required by UNSC 1441) about what happened to his weapons programs. You may choose to believe him. I don't.

We won't be able to stop Hussein and go in and think we can secure THEIR oil.
No, that's not going to go over very well. It IS a grab for their oil.

This comes across as more a religious belief on your part than anything based on rationality or history. We could've kept the Kuwaiti oil in 1991 had we wanted. We gave it back. We could've grabbed the Iraqi (and Saudi) oil back then, too. We didn't. For that matter, we could've kept it back in WWII when our forces drove the Germans out of Africa and the Middle East. We didn't. History has shown many times that we give back terroritory, not build empires. Did we keep Germany, Italy, Japan, or any of the other areas we captured in WWII? Nope.

So let's go in and just steal it.
After all, wars have been fought over the ages for grabbing someone else's loot.
Why SHOULDN"T we do it?

Because we've never done that before, so why do you insist we're going to it now? You really need to study some actual history and think rationally about this. You're being absurd.

BTW, where are all those documentaries about how GOOD life has been Afganistan since we liberated them from the Taliban? Where are the interviews with the soldiers who are building schools and feeding the starving?
Where?

The "good life" is relative. Is it good there compared to the United States? Nope, decades of war and hardship did an incredible amount of damage that'll take many years to rebuild. That's why people like US Army combat engineers are doing things like helping the Afghans rebuild schools and infrastructure. Be patient, it's going to take many years.

Now, compared to life under the Taliban, like for most Afghanis IS pretty good today and getting better. Women aren't forbidden to go outside their homes anymore. Girls have returned to school for the first time in years. The warlords are being defanged one by one. Life is getting better for them day by day.