I could never figure out why Kay said a few of the things he said either, but his reports were enough to convince me that Saddam left on his own for the next ten years was not going to be a good thing.

As for the WMD, your premise is wrong. I wasn't balancing the entire reasons for the war on WMD in the first place. That's other people that set up that scenario. Just like I'm not balancing the entire war on terror on bin Laden.

I saw a lot of reasons for bringing Saddam down. The combination of aggressiveness, imperial ambition, financial power, deceitfulness, a lust for WMD, and a history of proven nastiness in all these areas, put Saddam in a class that no other dictator currently occupies. From a sheer threat standpoint (nukes), I might have put North Korea a bit higher on the list, but North Korea was not a keystone for the Middle East.

I was no more put off by the lack of obvious stockpiles than I would have been if the cops had brought in someone who had shot dozens of people in front of witnesses in the past, and didn't find a gun in his house that day.

That Iraq is critical to the Islamists and totalitarians of the Middle East is obvious, or they wouldn't be fighting like hell to keep it from becoming a nation of elections.

I would have preferred that we didn't have to invade Iraq. Would have been cool if Saddam had decided, oh, what the hell, let's just disarm instead of acting like a cat with a canary stuffed in its mouth. Or decided that retirement in Syria was just what he needed. But sooner or later, it would have hit the fan. If not in Iraq, maybe Pakistan, or Syria, or even Indonesia. Certainly we are fighting them in African nations right now, but that hasn't made a lot of headlines.