To somer degree the notion that Saddam was a better alternative than the present is because he made Iraq so much ewasier to ignore as a far-off place with different rules.

Hundreds of thousands of Americans learned the words "Shiite" and "Sunni" and perhaps even "Allah" for the first time because of Bush's war. We as a population were force dby the war to look more closely at the nature of Middle Eastern entanglements.

This beneficial side-effect is trivial, though, compared to the blood and money wasted because we looked at it as though we were the planet's SWAT team, and those contained in Saddam's web were no more players than cheap inventory in a Target store.

So Bush opted for the solution of excessive force, ruining lives and unbalancing the economy in the process

A more intelligent leader would have weighed the elements in the problem more carefully.

For all his touting phrases about freedom and democracy, Bush made the basic and ridiculous mistake of have a paternalistic approach toward democracy. The biggest hole in his plan was that he did not care to understand the people to whom he was gifting democracy and how much difference their indifference to democratic principles is. (Not economic principles or secular freedoms, mind you).

A