The problem with your thinking is that there was never a non-botched execution for the Iraq war. If you understood this before the invasion, it was very easy to be against the war.
> The problem with your thinking is that there was never a non-botched execution for the Iraq war.
I don't buy that for a second. There is always a way to wage war and plan for the future of the invaded country afterwards. The Allied Forces have shown that this is both possible and sustainable with how they treated Germany post-WW2.
I've been thinking about this for a while, in terms of WW2 with Germany, and especially with Japan. A completely alien culture (mind you, from both sides, I'm not exotizing Japan so much as emphasizing the limited contact pre WW2) that felt diametrically opposed to our very way of life, we waged total war, both sides committed atrocities and then the US dropped the two biggest bombs ever dropped in war on civilian populations, dismantled their government, and to this day have restrictions on their military. By all rights they should hate us bitterly, but our nations and our people quickly became close allies, friends even. Americans love Anime and romanticize Japanese cultural institutions, such as the baths, their transit, the technology and urbanization of Japanese cities. Japanese people love Jazz, and baseball, and there's just a lovely mutual respect and cultural cross-pollination between two cultures that, while more similar than they were in WW2, still have many differences.
I know every situation is unique, and I think one of the advantages is that there was so little shared history, so little room for preexisting animosity, so both sides could say "Yeah, that was an unfortunate time, but we've realized our mistakes and get along now." But it still gives me hope for other seemingly intractable conflicts.
Germany and Japan were drastically different. They had a homogenous population, and their government structure could be used almost as it was with a new political system. In Germany, for example, many ex-nazis kept their position in society.
Iraq on the other hand is a state whose lines were drawn by a colonial rule and contains diffenrent populations. Saddam ruled using a minority ethnic group as the ruling class, which created an internal ethnic tension that was not possible to solve with an outside intervention.
In western Germany the denazification stopped very early despite our legends about 'nazi hunters' (the Mossad being the only agency that kept doing the real work), but it lasted two decades in east Germany, and no ex-Nazi kept their positions.
