If you are trying to give the linked article a fair shake, perhaps you should be comparing it to Afghanistan, not Iraq?   My impression was that we (the US) had some evidence that the government of Afghanistan was actually involved in attacking us, whereas the justification for the second war against Iraq was largely &quot;They kind of look like the guys who did it&quot;  - there was noise about &quot;weapons of mass destruction&quot; that was later proven to be a lie, but the impression I got from my more right-ish friends before it was debunked was that this was largely a ploy to get the weapon-hating left  to go along with it.