I stopped the car after getting making getting something from a store that’s closing so I can add this one point that I was missing. I’m saying this in the context of that first comment in the other thread littlegreenfootballs.com
It’s hardly the only good of the Iraq war (the main one being that we got Saddam’s boot off the throats of an oppressed MAJORITY - not even a minority - and off the Kurds’), but the goal of the neocons was to create something unimagined in the Middle East, an opening for people to believe that the could live in a normal, modern society, that they could transcend sectarian conflict, hatred, overthrow authoritarianism and aspire, not to the fascist dreams of triumph or revenge but to self-determination, a normal life, to personal goals in a civil society.

It seems a forlorn dream in a region where sectarian oppression is the norm everywhere, controls every political calculation and where even majorities live under brutal control.

We thought it was going to be easy, instead we unleashed the demons even more visibly. Shiite pilgrims are still getting blown up en-mass. But exposing those demons didn’t actually make things worse because there is much more hope for the future than there was. There is a path to progress.

We can’t take the easy way out and say “Iraq was immoral, doing such horrible things as making war is always immoral” because we might even have succeeded in the long run.

The Arab Spring happened.
The popular uprising in Iran may not have won, but it is still magnificent.