It is telling when you see people lamenting US ability to conduct two wars overseas simultaneously. Why anyone should aspire to conducting wars overseas is beyond me. Of course when you have huge industrial and financial investment in producing weaponry you have an interest in creating the demand for weaponary.

The massive investment in technological weaponary has focussed on being able to wreak destruction and death from a safe distance. That way it is so much easier to ignore the fact that people are being slaughtered. It makes destruction posssible but does not help in anyway create conditions for a peaceful hatred. Rather it builds a well of resentment and rejection of Western values which will last for generations.

It seems to me unlikely that any of this is accidental. The destruction of the infrastructure, in particular water, sewage,power and communications had nothing to defeating Saddams army but was a key ingredient in ensuring that Iraq was not an independent and strong economy with a place in world affairs because of the oil under its land.

The whole point of Democracy is that the biggest strongest and most violent member of the community does not dominate what happens but that even the powerful attempt to convince the rest of the community and abide by the majority position. When you start a war making it clear that regardless of what the UN say you are going ahead anyway, threaten smaller nations that to not support you is to open yourself to financial sanctions and ruin you need to be pretty thick skinned to pretend that this has anything to do with democracy.