The present military-industrial system running the USA has to have wars in order to maintain itself in the economic style to which it has become accustomed since the end of WWII.

That's the basic reason Bush and many presidents before him have gone to war...NOT to protect the USA, but to maintain the continued war production levels of the military-industrial complex. Trumped-up excuses have been found for those wars, and more will be found soon, I am sure.

It's quite similar to the scenario set out in Orwell's "1984" where the ruling system had an endless war going in various distant foreign places as well as an endless domestic surveillance program happening, fueled by constand paranoia about imagined threats, both foreign and domestic.

Those threats were all in truth illusory, but they served to justify the system's continued state of foreign war and domestic surveillance.

And that's what you have in the USA. There was no way that Saddam was any real threat to America. Not at any time. But America was a very real threat to Saddam, as has been amply demonstrated.

And there will be other Saddams. Depend upon it. If they did not exist, they would have to be invented (in Washington). Ahmadinejad is the foremost man presently being marketed as the new "Saddam", and it's convenient for America that he fits the profile so very well indeed.