Well, the real problem was that the antiwar movement was trying to make a moral argument against the war, when the real argument against the war was a realist one. After all, all the real arguments that Saddam Hussein should have been allowed to keep his throne in Baghdad were procedural and prudential:
--(i) that we want to build a world in which the United Nations guarantees to every country a republican form of government (or, at least, a non-genocidal form of government), and that unilaterial U.S. action moves us further from that world.
--(ii) that just as American bombs and bullets killed more Vietnamese than Ho Chi Minh's dictatorship would have, so Iraqi nationalism would be strong enough that the Iraqis would fight for Saddam, and so we would have to destroy this village if we wanted to save it.
--(iii) that blowback I--in terms of CNN becoming an effective Al Qaeda recruitment video--would be horrendous.
--(iv) that blowback II--in terms of the destruction of our alliances, and the lack of future cooperation with America in its war on Al Qaeda--would be horrendous.
These reasons seemed to me to be sufficient that I was against this war: thinking that it was too bad that we were leaving the Iraqi people to twist slowly, slowly in the wind, subject to the tender mercies of Saddam Hussein, but that Saddam Hussein was not a threat to the U.S. (and if he was a threat he was a deterrable threat), and so the least-bad option was to leave Saddam in power: for, as Henry Kissinger is wont to say, foreign policy is not missionary work.
But one of the antiwar movement's big problems is that the moral rhetoric of American peaceniks ("violence is not the answer" "no blood for oil" et cetera) does not map onto the prudential--realist--case that we should sacrifice the well-being of Iraqis to create a calmer and more orderly world. And if you don't map onto the realist case, you run an immense danger of falling into the role of apologists for what really was a very bad dictatorship.
Brad DeLong