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He's a bully. He looked out over our enemies and guessed that Saddam would be the easiest one to beat. He wasn't going to get into a fight he wasn't "sure" he could win. He was determined to prove his manhood as a war pResident. Unfortunately, his assessment was superficial and ignored some pretty obvious problems any invaders would be certain to encounter. Iraq, as a country, is an artificial construct. It only remained whole while tightly controlled by an authoritarian thug. That was fine with us as long as we could exert a reasonable amount of influence on this thug. When Saddam turned against the West, he was no longer acceptable to us. At the same time, we could not just replace him with some new thug; it would give lie to one of our pretenses for going to war in the first place. So while getting rid of Saddam was easy, gaining anything of any advantage to us beyond that was impossible in the first place. It should not have taken a lot insight to see this from the outset. Unfortunately for all of us, it took more than Little Boots was capable of.
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