Many decent people after Rwanda, Bosnia, Kosovo, et al., believed that the international community had an obligation to intervene to protect the human rights of Tutsis, Bosniaks, and Kosovars. They were horrified to learn how the U.N. stood by and allowed the massacre in Rwanda, and supported the interventions in the Balkans later in the decade.
This same argument was proposed as a compelling reason for intervening in Iraq. I was astonished at how many people whose thinking and poltics I otherwise respected justified the invasion of Iraq on humanitarian grounds, arguing that national sovreignty should be superseded when the rights of a naton's citizens were being egregiously abused. It should have been done in Rwanda, and it was good that it was done in the Balkans. Why was Iraq any different? Why was Bush doing anything differently than Clinton did?
Well, there were plenty of reasons that Iraq was different and why the Bush administraton's rationale for invasion never passed the smell test. And the first thing anybody with any nose at all smelled was the oil. The overwrought attempts to connect Saddam with al-Quaeda, the hysteria about WMD--none of it added up. And then when the influence of the neocon Project for the New American Century came into view, it all made sense. This was a geopolitical power grab and an exercise in state building engineered by second-rate, chicken-hawk technocrats. The hubris was fantastical, and the results predictable.