Before the war, Russia and France, who stood fast in the U.N. against military action against Iraq, were raking in barrels of cash from Saddam. As best as I can tell, nobody is making this part of the discussion on why we went to war without the U.N.

Sorry, it wasn't France or Russia but individuals from those countries and many others like the US ans perhaps also companies. Don't generalize.

If we hadn't invaded Iraq, all the bad would just have gone away, the little kites would be flying, the sanctions would just fade into rainbows, and all the deaths would be somewhere else where we wouldn't have to think about them.

There are two huge problems here: first, no matter how evil and dangerous the dictator was, it was his responsability not yours. But at the moment coutries started the war , it became their responsability.
Second, there are many many other dictatorships that have no been freed from their dictator. Why this bias?
Plenty of intellectuals, worldwide, were scandalized by what's going on here and there and by the fact we didn't do anything about it, to force countries to respect human rights. But the US didn't wait, invaded one country while still under the UN concept of non interference against sovereign countries (rather than have changed the UN's competence concerning punishing abuse of human rights).