Dead it was the right thing to do in this case saddam had plenty of chances and plenty of time to show us that he was disarmed and he did not. Combine that legal reason for the attack with the reality that he was openly financing suicide bombers in Isral and thus adding incentive to extending the crisis and so raising regional instability it makes a good case for the USA to attack out of our own and our allies national intersets. Moreover the French position to outright veto ANY UNSC use of force proclamaion in support of 1441 noncompliance measures made it impossible to go the UN route. This was nothiong unusual as the USA and allies have acted independently of the UN before, most notably in Kosovo to IMHO great success and stopped another developing miliosevic genocide before. In other words we looked into his past behavior saw current developents and decided not to wait for another Bosnian genocide scale outrage to provide evidence that nobody could challenge. Remember the russians were very very oppoosed to the Kosovo attack - the serbs and russians are very close historically.
And IMHO the USA undertook a similar analysis of the Iraq situation, we were unwilling to risk saddam betraying us again and starting more trouble. On the appeals of Colin Powell the govt dcided to try the UN route and got the stronly worded unanimous 1441 resolution demanding iraq come clean or else military force would be used. They did not, they violated 1441 disclore provisions and again showed they could not be trusted. In the mean time france started her games about not allowing ANY use of force. This appeasemt weakness only emboldenned Saddam and he resite further and thus we had the war.
Saddam is gone, the iraqis are free, the checks to suicide bombers arte stopped, the wmd program is over, the UN bs is over and as usaual America is leading the charge in doing the rigth things and the difficult things as europeran intellectual elites do the chatting andpointless nuanced moralising about the virtues of saddam.
