Kick my ass for saying it but I think its fair to ask whether or not invading was a mistake.
No. The mistake was leaving.
It is the Obama doctrine:
Leave a region of the world so that it can destabilize...
The plan to weaken them and seek the removal of Hussein was made on the assumption that we would remain to stabilize things. It did not account for the Americans withdrawing and leaving a vacuum, as well as arming the more radical elements in the Middle East, creating ISIS and other threats.
Reagan seemed to be able to put the fear into despots without invading their countries. I’m not sure we’ve had a president since that could do the same.
I think that if a number of noted democrats and the media hadn’t sabotaged the war effort and given aid and comfort to the enemy, the war would have had an over all positive effect.
This is just an isolated measure, but I think it should be borne in mind: Saddam's stability was a state of steady war against various hostile tribes and political enemies. When they found the Saddam-era mass graves in various spots after the U.S. takeover in 2003, the numbers were truly staggering.
I did a little calculation for an AT column and discovered that Iraqis died at a slower pace during their hot war against the U.S. than during peacetime under Saddam Hussein. (That means I excluded GW-1 and the Iran-Iraq war.)
He was a prodigy of killing. I'm not saying that fact should be dispositive in our foreign-policy choices—after all, it's their lousy country. But considering Lockerbie, plus his long history of funneling money to Pali suicide bombers and who-knows-who else, plus his gas attacks on the Kurds, etc., and culminating in his statement on 9-12-01 saying that we deserved 9-11 (the only such statement from a world leader at that time) I would say concerns about him were not unreasonable.
No kicks here but it was worse than a mistake, it was an intentional deliberate misleading of the American people by groups with purposes not yet revealed.