Agreed! I would rather have had us take out Saddam in '91 when we had the chance, than to go through the subsequent 12 years of slow warfare that we did. I did not like the "sanctions regime / no fly zone / starve him out of power" approach. It didn't work with Castro and it didn't work with Saddam.
That's why I applauded when we changed our approach and escalated the war to a shooting war, and ousted Saddam militarily once and for all. If you, like me, disliked the former approach ("sanctions/no fly zone"), then why do you not welcome the latter (preemptive military strike)?
Because I was never sold on the need for the first Gulf War to begin with. And the events that followed that first Gilf War (the no-fly zones, the abandonment of the Kurds and Shi'ites who rose up against Hussein, etc.) convinced me that the United States didn't have a freakin' clue what we were doing from one week to the next. And we still don't.