It is said that even a bad union is better than no union (which is probably true 99.99% of the time). It's time for leftists to say that even a bad government is better than no government (which is also probably true 99.99% of the time, unless an alternative ready to take power exists on the ground), especially in the age of Al Qaeda* and the "War on Terror," the latter creating a vacuum of government where the former can thrive.
There is no question that the pre-war Iraqi government was a bad government, so bad that it enjoyed little popular support and collapsed easily upon the US invasion. But even that government was doing what's worthwhile, since leftists elsewhere clearly cannot provide the Iraqi people with what that government provided them with.
But there were just two organizations -- small collectives of old-fashioned Marxist-Leninists and old-fashioned feminists -- on the American Left that unmistakably pointed out what the pre-war Iraqi government did for the Iraqis, especially women, that was worth defending (instead of mentioning it in passing):
Redstockings <http://www.afn.org/~redstock/iraqiwomenp1.html> and Workers' World <http://www.workers.org/>.
Needless to say, Redstockings could not hope to reach a large audience, it being essentially an archive, and the reputation of old-fashioned Marxist-Leninism being lower than even that of Islamism in the USA, it is difficult to see what positive impact WW and its fronts International Action Center and International Answer had on the public.
To be sure, there were scholarly publications from which the public could have gotten much the same point as well as the complexity of Iraq, but few read them.
It's possible that, the number of leftists in the USA being so small, it didn't matter what they said and that the sanctions would have stayed and the war would have begun in any case. But taking a long-term view on a war of position, since the War on Terror may last as long as the Cold War, it's worth keeping in mind that people won't vigorously object to destruction of a government that is utterly worthless in their estimation.
I hear that a small number of sensible conservatives, such as Andrew Sullivan, are now doing a little soul search and rediscovering "epistemological modesty": "Conservatives need to relearn the lessons of Burke and Hayek — that the world is complex, and efforts to transform it will have unintended consequences, most of them bad" (David Brooks, "Where the Right Went Wrong," a review of Andrew Sullivan's The Conservative Soul, 22 October 2006, <http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/22/books/review/Brooks.t.html>). Good for them, though I doubt that the rest of conservatives, who are merely political and economic liberals keener on social engineering than avowed liberals themselves, will make an Oakeshottian turn. I hope that leftists will also begin to think that they can use a little political modesty, without going so far as to adopt Burke, et al.'s philosophy, though this won't come easily to them**, for the modern Left are imbued with the Promethean ethos, the ethos of Romantics as well as Marx and Engels, especially the Marx and Engels of The Communist Manifesto.
Better to devote the Promethean drive to reformation at home, and spare the rest of the world, for there is no country that is more in need of reforms than this one.
* I mean the Islamist terrorists of the Al Qaeda tendency, for lack of a better term, many of whom by now probably have no formal connection to Al Qaeda as such, as the CIA acknowledges.
** Except postmodernists. -- Yoshie <http://montages.blogspot.com/> <http://mrzine.org> <http://monthlyreview.org/>