>>>There were many justifications for the Iraqi war,
>
>Some consider there would be no grounds to invade if not for the WMD.

Tell you what, I'll paraphrase, to be consistent with what I've said in the past. There are arguments for the war.

Even though the actual level of WMDs turned out to be far less than what Hussein boasted - it is a fact that Hussein and his army were (and none of this is new)

- torturing tens of thousands in Northwest Iraq. People tend to under-state the level of human rights abuses under Saddam even after the Gulf War
- seizing foreign aid intended for the poor in his country
- offering blood money to families of Palestinian suicide bombers
- repeatedly violating many of the terms of the original Gulf War, such as trading on the Russian black market
- providing safe haven for known Palestinian and Al-Q terrorists (a fact even liberals have criticized Iraq for)
- at least planning for the creation of new WMD structures (the inspectors did find schematics and diagrams in abandoned Iraqi warehouses that showed plans they were about five years off from construction)


Yes, I realize that someone can make counter-arguments that these scenarios exist in other countries. I didn't say that it's an easy argument that the war was justified.
I will definitely say that Bush and his initial military heads royally fouled up on the strategy and it did lead to excessive loss of lives. I've criticized Barack Obama as an incompetent executive and I'll say the same for George W Bush