Iraq was, and remains in history as an illegal invasion of a sovereign nation by a belligerent cabal of nations vowed and declared on regime change for the purposes of installing a puppet government friendly in the main to the US. There are multiple precedents for such duplicitous actions by the US, the most relevant coming to mind being the CIA-backed overthrow of Mohammed Mossadeq in 1953. Regime change to secure a vital source of middle-eastern oil from being nationalised under Mossadeq, and placed out of the influence of multi-national conglomerates.
Additional considerations were at stake in the case of Iraq, but essentially a hard-rightwing coup de tete was conducted by ideologically cyclopian demagogues using the lives of military force members and civilians as sacrificial pawns in a game of 'capture the flag', designed specifically to secure American industrial and political interests in the middle east. The House of Saud had expressed disinterest in hosting America and America needed that presence in the region, so Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Kristol, Bolton, Brooks, Frum, Gingrich, Kagan, Perle, Woolsey and Zeollick to name but a few of the antagonists both before and after the Bush administration's installation who pushed and pushed hard for their own selfish agenda to be realised. A read of the first of the
'Letters to the President' from the PNAC camarilla is dated 26 January 1998 and even then, regime change and the bogus WMD claims were being created & aired. I'll give the PNAC dogs their due. They were at least honest enough to bark 'regime change' before they barked 'WMD' but only just. Nowhere in that letter, or indeed any of the subsequent letters is there mention of, or coherent linkage to any benefit of regime change to the average 'man_in_the_street' Iraqi citizen. Hundreds of thousands have died for the blind vanity of ideologues who have never experienced what Iraqis have been forced to endure since March 2003. And for what?
The duplicity is gross. Correspondences from PNAC and AEI to mention two easily accessible right-wing thinktanks dare to mention UNSCR1441 as somehow validating their call for regime change by forceful military aggression against a sovereign nation. The arrogance and sanctimonious misanthropy with which such claims are made is affronting and insulting to any fair-minded observer. But of course, as we now know, fair-mindedness and the voice of the people never entered into the considerations of the ideologues.
May those responsible be damned for all time. May those responsible be held to account by a future Iraqi government or international criminal charge. The hands of the right are covered in the blood of young military personnel and Iraqi citizens which will never wash off.