"I watched a few minutes of the C-Span stuff with Chicago professor Robert Pape"
I have to wonder what he is a "professor" of. He can't be a very good one since his political ideology, rather then reality, clearly dictated what he put in his book. Click the link below to find out what Iraq is really all about.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1439221/posts
In a nutshell:
In the war on Terrorism, we have a hidden foe, spread
out across a geographically diverse area, with covert sources of supply. Since we cannot go everywhere they hide out, we need to draw them out of hiding into a
kill zone. Iraq is that kill zone. That is the true brilliance of the Iraq strategy. We draw the terrorists out of their world wide hiding places onto a battlefield they have to fight on for political reasons (The "Holy" soil of the Arabian peninsula) where they have to pit their weakest ability (Conventional Military combat power) against our greatest strength (ability to call down
unbelievable amounts of firepower) where they will primarily have to fight other forces (the Iraqi Security forces) in a battlefield that is hostile to guerilla
warfare. (Iraqi-mostly open terrain as opposed to guerrilla friendly areas like the mountains of Afghanistan or the jungles of SE Asia).
But then reality would not fit in with the child like world view of the "professor", and his fellow traveling terrorist wannabees, so they just ignore it in order to maintain ideological purity in their works.