re: Democracy must be won by the people, not inflicted.
Democracy can't be won by the people until the tyrant loses enough power to stop killing those people wholesale. As you point out, we let them try it on their own after the first Gulf War. That went well, didn't it?
If our intelligence had really been so good, we could have assassinated the bastard with our smart bombs and avoided a lot of this.
We captured Saddam. Did all the bad guys go away?
Unfortunately, the Bush administration had also hoped that nailing Saddam in the early days of the war would fix a lot of things quickly. I don't think it would have.
If we had nailed bin Laden three years ago, al Qaeda wouldn't have evaporated either, something that many Democrats and a lot of Republicans don't seem to get.