And the cause to goto war was... WMDS? Find Bin Laden? Remove an established leader of a country? I guess.. now we got a mess.. I'll give him a D+.
OK, so let's review what we know about the cause for the war.
1.) For oil - great, but we're not taking it. Why not? Oh, maybe the war *wasn't* for oil. I don't know, maybe we're secretly taking it.
2.) For WMDs - great, but we haven't found any. Oh, but Iraq is a giant desert. The
UN thought that Iraq had WMDs (see resolution 1441). And he had six months to get his weapons to other countries before the US came in (GWB offered this timeframe in advance). Of course, there might not have been any (aside from the caches we did find).
What *mess* do we have? From what I have seen, I don't think it's going too terribly bad. In fact, I think it's pretty benign for that part of the world. In the American revolution, we had lots of dissent even immediately following the war with Britain. The Americans were lucky though; we'd been exposed to moderate classical liberalism for a long time by then. Of course, European countries who had been exposed to these ideas had some
rough times, too (at least in Iraq we're not calling what's going on "
The Reign of Terror").
Also, I'd like to include this little nugget from an actual scholarly article:
In short, governments of potentially intervening powers find themselves in a situation in which they must choose between two evils: either they renege on their commitment to human rights or they bear the costs of a humanitarian intervention from which they can hardly expect any direct benefit.
[...]
In light of this situation, there ought to be a reversal of the burden of proof. Whereas intervening powers previously have had to demonstrate that they were justified in intervening for humanitarian reasons, today they should have to justify not intervening militarily in the absence of other efficient means to stop massive human rights violations.
Merle, Jean-Christophe. (2005). The problem with military humanitarian intervention and its solution.
The Philosophical Forum, 36(1), 59-75.