No Carrots, I'm afraid we don't agree on much at all:

"...we agree that the infrastructure is f*cked,"

Correction, the infrastructure WAS f*cked, it is now in the process of being restored and improved upon, but that doesn't hit the headlines does it Carrots? And the likes of yourself ignore the information when presented with it. All this restoration and improvement was something that seemed to have slipped Saddam's priority list in the eleven post Desert Storm years he had gathering in the oil revenue of Iraq through the smuggling operations that he was running. That netted him a tidy sum that he spent on what Carrots?

Food? - No
Medicine? - No
Medical supplies? - No
Civil Engineering Projects (Infrastructure)? - No
Circumventing UN Sanctions? - Yes
Harassing and deceiving the UN Inspectors? - Yes
Purchasing weapons? - Yes
384 Rocket Motors? - Yes
Numerous Presidential Palaces (Immune from UNSCOM inspection)? - Yes
Creation, Training and Arming of a Special Security Force (Fedaheen Saddam)? - Yes

"...that there is no effective administration,"

Well Carrots, show me somwhere that has an effective administration. I know you rabbit on a bit about China and it's glories and aspirations, but when all said and done you wouldn't get thousands of people standing in lines to try and get into China would you? I don't think that they have much of an illegal alien problem? In fact if memory serves me correctly from my time out in Hong Kong it was quite the reverse, the Communist Chinese Authorities seemed to have a great deal of trouble keeping their people in.

"...the place is hideously factionalised,"

Stating the obvious Carrots, it has been fractionalised, hideously or not, since 1922. Not such a bad thing though Carrots, the UK has been hideously fractionalised for a damn sight longer than that, but we still manage to rub along don't we?

"...that the death toll looks likely to rise inexorably"

Ah yes Carrots the blinding truth of it? as your mother came to term Carrots you could be given two cast iron guarantees:
1) You will be born.
2) You will die.

"...and that the US looks like being bogged down for years to come with few friends in the region."

As has always been the case, or hadn't you noticed Carrots?

"Well, apart from that, you think the Iraq adventure has been a jolly good thing, eh? America is now secure from attack, wash hands, toys away, Endex, eh? The operation was a complete success. Unfortunately the patient died."

I see that you have adopted the "fellow travellers" habit of putting words into other peoples mouths then taking them to task over them. Ron Davies did it much better, old fruit, didn't have any effect though, added nothing to his line of reasoning once exposed for what it was.