What Bothers Me About Iraq

Since Iraq hasn't been in the news lately (ha, ha), I thought I'd reflect back on the last few years.  Admittedly, something positive has come out of the war: Saddam is no longer in power.  Was it worth it?

Here are the things that bother me most about all of this:

1. 2081 US troops and tens of thousand of Iraqi civilians (30,000?100,000?) have died.  How many Iraqi soldiers were killed in the war?  I haven't heard.  What do we have to show for it?  A country in shambles, a security nightmare.
2. $220 billion has been spent on the war and the rebuilding effort.  It's pretty easy to think of better ways to spend that money.
3. Administration officials like Rumsfeld and Cheney have been so terribly wrong on so many fundamental issues (they completely misjudged how we would be greeted in Iraq (is that how they treat liberators?), vastly misunderestimated the troop level that would be required and called Gen. Shinseki's estimation that several hundred thousand troops would be required for post-war Iraq "wildly off the mark," thought the insurgency was in its "last throes" in May 2005, etc.), yet they have not been held accountable for their poor job performance and apparent incompetence.
4. Despite thinking that an invasion was not the best way to deal with Saddam and his WMD's, many democrats made the political decision to support the invasion rather than risk doing the alternative.  Now they have to resort to calling the other side liars (for the most part, I don't think they lied, because they believed what they said even if they shouldn't have) because they abandoned the moral high ground long ago.