It was evident during Powell's UN presetation that the WMD argument was hooey. UNSCOM had already succeeded in disarming Saddam. The wars Saddam fought were local conflicts, and with the April Glaspie transcripts, we see that the Wolfowitz gang suckered Saddam into believing that we had no opinion on what he did to Kuwait. The Iran Iraq war was fought over the oil ports on the gulf, and the Shia in the south were (and are) heavily infiltrated by Iran. Saddam had a civil war on his hands, and an ongoing threat from Iran, thanks to Bush I.
Look, there is a lot of propaganda to maintain popular suppport for a pre-emptive war. In my conversations with Iraqis, I was amazed to hear that they did not view Saddam as a monster. One fellow who is here now, lost both his son and his father (both civilians) in this war. He told me that Saddam had been doing good things for his country back in the 80's. One man's point of view, granted. Not one that he offered easily either. I had to convince him that I wasn't a brownshirt personality first, and then when he decided he wanted to talk, he could barely contain his grief. He believes that the American people don't really know what's going on.
I don't know what kind of guy Saddam was, and maybe he's everything the US government says he is. There are murderers all over the world, like Mugabe and whoever now runs the concentration camp known as North Korea. Frankly, from what I have been able to glean, they are far worse than Saddam (or Milosevic) was. What I do know is that it's time to take the blinders off regarding our own government; the only one we have a right to control.
Failing for whatever reason, some good maybe, some bad, to bring down a genocidal killer in one place, is not an excuse to fail to bring down one, elsewhere, when the opportunity presents itself.