Well, it's got to be done in a way that allows us to beleive we aren't monsters.

Carpet bombing Iraqi cities might have been a quick way to subdue that country, but might also have been an even quicker way to lose popular support domestically. Even embeded reporters would have to mention corpses if they couldn't move without tripping over them. I think we revel in the beleif that we can wage war without making a mess.

And we still have to do business with the rest of the world, so we can't repulse them to the point that they shun us entirely. How could we outsource jobs to India, for example, if the buildings used there by American companies kept getting firebombed? We can insult and disparage the world all we want, but in the end we still have to live here.

As for our goal, I don't know anymore. Thought I did once. I now think it's a much, much more complicated issue. There are agendas wrapped in agendas here. Do I accept that there were extremely serious intelligence failures? Yes. But I also think the results of those failures were eagerly exploited by an administration far more interested in confrontation than in truth. That makes them, at a minimum, incompetant and irresponsible. At a minimum.

I'm certain there are those in the admin who would genuinely like to see a free and prosperous Iraq. Ultimately though, it's not for the benefit of the Iraqis, but rather because of a beleif that the growth of democracy in the middle east would be good for American security. Be that as it may.

My point is, don't keep saying we're doing this for the good of the Iraqis, when in fact we don't give a damn about them. We sat on our hands for decades while Sadaam raped that country. Hell, we were his buddy for a time.

But if Iraq should, in the future, fall under another dictatorship, will we storm back in and liberate them all over again? Or would it hinge on whether the dictator could be bargained with? My guess (yes, that's all it is) is that if the dictator turned out to be "our bastard," we'd have no problem letting him do all the opressing he wanted to do. Just as long as we could pull all the strings we want to pull.