And the point I'm making, Dave, is that the US didn't regard Saddam as a "bad guy" as long as he was killing the people we told him to. And even when he invaded Quwait, he thought he was doing it with our blessing. We set him up as a straw man so we could use him to do our dirty work and then knock him down when we had enough dirt on him to "justify" invading his country, appropriating its natural resources, and using it as our strategic military base in the Middle East.

One of the members of the Bush administration was quoted as saying "we are an empire... we make reality... people will be studying us and our methods".

We don't need to study their methods in retrospect. We can observe them right now, as they are happening. The patterns are more than obvious.