In the end, wasn't Saddam the WMD?

While I agree that Saddam was most definitely a "bad guy", that doesn't necessarily justify what we did. Things like violence and war are only justified as a last resort, and I am not at all convinced that we had hit that last resort point.

That, and all these comparisons of Saddam to Hitler are really quite inaccurate. They were both awful, yes, but on entirely different scales. But that's a slightly different issue, I suppose.

Bottom line of all this, I guess, is this seems to set a scary precedent for "preemptive war", and it also sort of tore apart the international community. The most ironic part was we touted spreading democracy as one of our main reasons for this war, yet to get this war off the ground we circumvented the democratic process in countries around the world. Pretty much every country in our "coalition of the willing" was a country where the actual people there did *not* support the war.

America and Israel had popular support for the war before it began, and after it began I believe Britain got popular support for it as well, but many of the other countries did not actually support the war. We coerced the governments into not listening to their own constituents. Doesn't sound very democratic of us.

That, and our preaching democracy reason is even more ironic because following current events in Iraq it looks like it's quite possible that they might not end up with a terribly good democratic set up. It could go either way at this point, but it's odd that Iran (the country that we didn't invade) is stirring on their own for democracy while Iraq (the country that we dropped bombs all over and such) is looking like it could end up with an Islamic fundamentalist government of some sort.