The war in Iraq was never about finding weapons of mass destruction or bringing freedom to the Iraqi people. It was nothing more than an act of revenge against Muslims for the September 11th attacks. If you don't believe me, listen to people talk about what we should have done or what we should do in Iraq. You'll hear things like "turn the whole place into a glass parking lot", "kill every last one of them", "bomb them back into the stone age", "we should let our Soldiers take off their mittens and fight this like a real war" etc. If the war in Iraq was about spreading freedom, democracy, and other things we inherently believe as being good and people believed or bought into that, you wouldn't hear comments like that.
The truth is we didn't fight this war with any level of restraint. The ROE (rules of engagement) was very lax and favorable. If we felt threatened under any circumstance deadly force was authorized and generously applied. We did as we pleased in Iraq and the numbers of Iraqis killed demonstrates that. My platoon, which was far from unique in its experience, managed to kill 46-48 people and wound more than 100 during my deployment. I'm not going into an in-depth discussion about this on a semi-anonymous forum, but I can assure you that not all of those were combatants.
The war was about killing as many Muslims as possible and completely obliterating that country and, in that sense, it was a glorious success.