It’s March, must be pontificating bullshit time!
I recall the justifications evolved something like this. (Justification is important, who wants to support an unjust war except extreme nationalists & armchair generals?)
1) Arabs did 9/11. Saddam is Arab. Arabs are bad. Saddam is bad. Ipso facto, lets invade. All this equated to the administration drawing a line connecting the secular baath regime which regularly tortured citizens that prayed too much and the jihadists. It held water in the U.S but not really outside the U.S and it’s generally been refuted since. The U.S needed some help, and Tony Blair knew the British are too clued by their evil liberal media and their interest in the world outside their own borders to swallow it.
2) WMD. The grand poohbah! A complete and utter farce. I feel most sorry for Colin Powell for his part in this. I remember watching the UNSC meeting where he outlined a massive weapons program that turned out to be bullshit feed to him by the scumbags pushing the war, who hated him anyway. That’s his defining moment in history now. I heard a quote attributed to him from the night before I’m not reading this, this is bullshit. Should have stuck with his gut and resigned there and then. He would have been horribly vilified initially, but completely vindicated by now.
So it was complete crap and we all know it now. The cynic in me tells me that the U.S already knew there was nothing or next to nothing before they sent in the troops. Why? Because if there was a significant deterrent, the U.S would have taken significant casualities, tens of thousands. Untenable, especially with an election the next year. That’s speculation.
Regardless, the genuine situations with North Korea and Iran WMD programs were completely glossed over and this showed to me that the U.S had settled on WMD as a classic strawman in the argument for the Iraq war. I was arguing with Sinner about it at the time about the ins and outs of it and he came out with this statement:
Iraq constitutes a direct threat to me and my family and so we need to neutralise the threat (paraphrasing)
He lives in the center of Canada for christ’s sake. Time has proven that the fear drummed up by the hawks public pronouncements, mushroom cloud imagery by the Veep etc, was just plain silly. It was fairly obvious then too. But trying to argue against WMD before the war made it seem like like you were appeasing a potent military force who was plotting to kill you and yours. As the race to Baghdad showed, you could have blown over the Iraqi military.
3) Saddam threatened his neighbours. Oh yeah Iran. The US was really upset about that :P. Kuwait? Saudi Arabia? The Gulf War, sanctions and the no-fly zones effectively ended Iraq’s ability to project power outside it’s borders, it couldn’t even reconquer Iraqi Kurdistan. Easily refuted at the time and the ease of the ground war underlined that.
4) For freedom and democracy. Another strawman. Hate the Iraq war? You must hate the Iraqi people, they need our help. You think the U.S and U.K publics want to pay $250 billion to help Muslims after 9/11? Not that they’ve made a good job of it. It’s a civil war, forget the humming and hawing, if 10000 + Iraqis are dying a year, it’s a fucking civil war.
5) It has become the central front in the war on terror. No shit. After they invaded. No argument there. Isn’t the War on Terror supposed to reduce terrorism?
So, a lot of bullshit and lies. It’s happened before, Remember the Maine?

So what was it for, really? What has been accomplished? What’s it for now?
I’m not anti-US or anti US-military intervention per se, it was justified in the former Yugoslavia, Afganistan and prolly in Iran if the West has the stomach for it. The Iraq war, though, stinks to high heaven.