Iraq is a work in progress. The actual conventional "war" against a nation with the world's fifth largest army, was won in a month. This, in spite of absurd liberal contentions and predictions that we would take years, lose it, or it would cost America tens of thousands in American casualties in a prolonged fierce "Vietnam style" quagmire. The war, and what has happened since the major military operation to defeat Saddam ended is anything but the oft used liberal term..."quagmire." In the few months since the successful conclusion of the "war" we've had about a hundred soldiers killed in guerilla style attacks, suicide bombings, and land-mines. Unfortunately, nearly as many soldiers have fallen due to accidents as have died in actual military operations, yet to listen to the American (liberal) media, some people might be led to believe we actually have this "quagmire" that the libs want to exist.
In general, the vast majority (about 75%) of Iraqi people are elated that we liberated them and took out their despotic dictator. Iraq is (as are most of the Middle Eastern Islamic nations) a nation of 12th century tribal regionalism and sharply divided political, religious and social strife. Their only ticket to the 20th (not to mention the 21st) Century is a large pool of oil beneath their land. Their general society (with some exceptions of course) has a few centuries of "catching-up" to accomplish in a few months and years if any kind of democracy as Americans know it has a chance of succeeding there. Illusions of that happening in the course of a few months are simply smoke. Twelfth century societies with nuclear or chemical/biological weapons must be checked, else we will all (those of us who survive at least) opine for the good-old days when oil was useful for anything more than a smoky lamp with a rope wick to light a cave.
Liberals are green with frustration and disappointment that America succeeded, and because of the Republicans in charge, want desperately to see their dire predictions come to fruition. Since it didn't with regard to the war, the libs have constructed their "fall-back" plan. It essentially consists of magnifying any negative aspect of ongoing reconstruction operations there, and trying to build a case for making Bush look A. foolish, B. tyrannical, C. oblivious or D. fiendishly clever and cunning...but evil, and totally without any "plan." Democrats have questioned the president's motivation and suggested that he intentionally invaded Iraq for "oil, revenge, to hide economic shortfalls, (Clinton recession) as a distraction from the economy, as part of a grand scheme to build up the military industrial complex, and to acquire personal riches (somehow.)" Any of those aspects apply depending upon which audience the liberals are attempting to appeal to, but the general objective is to take our stunning military success and the ongoing process of rehabilitating a former enemy state, (a project that will take years...) and make it seem like America has embarked upon a path that was evil, wrong, morally corrupt, and deceptive from the beginning.
In order to accept the liberal point of view regarding Iraq and Afghanistan, one must totally surrender to the absurd contention that America is a nation led (since the 2000 election only) by diabolically evil people. You must believe that Saddam Hussein was not (so) evil as OUR leadership. You have to literally buy into the anti-American views that 25% of the German population (according to recent polls) believes. Specifically, a large number of Germans and French (the socialist contingent) believe that the American government (under the evil G. W. Bush, a man vilified alternating between the personas of an evil genius intent on world domination, and a total moron with an IQ of 80), orchestrated the events of 9-11-01 in the world's most Byzantine grand conspiracy for the purpose of justifying military expansion and the overthrow of independent nation-states which we wish to conquer. There are radical left-wing bug-eyed activists who submit essays to this forum who actually contend these things in convoluted scenarios of paranoid, hate inspired delusional anti-American rhetoric. So desperate to connect George Bush to this silly conspiracy scenario, lefties parse words and partial sentences out of context from a state-of-the-union address to "prove" that Bush "lied" about Iraq's nuclear weapons initiatives. Even when the words of Bush match remarkably with those of former President Clinton the libs say it's a fraud. Bubba warned the nation in 1998 after the UN inspectors were tossed out, that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction in place and/or in production, and that Hussein would certainly use them. Still yet, the liberals insist that Bush knew this was not true. Liberals question the motivation for the Iraq war, and dismiss the events that (over the course of several years) escalated from repeated ultimatums, warnings, to eventually the action which Bush took after several months of offers to Saddam to avoid a conflict. Most likely, in the face of certain defeat, Hussein has effectively hidden or disposed of his weapons and programs that were the object of 8 years of UN inspections. Still, it takes a fantastically cynical outlook to contend, as liberals do, that an evil America launched this overthrow in the face of faultyintelligence, or even more diabolical, with prior knowledge that Iraq's WOMD, or the plans to build them' did not even exist.