I'm never one to respect any liberals unless they are willing to sell me drugs at a discount, but a guy named Richard Brookhiser has written a terrific piece in the very very liberal The New York Observer. The Observer is honest. They blasted Hillary when she ran for the Senate, and have taken other stands. A couple of outtakes from the piece:

We are in Iraq for our own good. Saddam Hussein was an infection ever ready to spread. He harbored terrorists and paid for terrorism in Israel. He shot at American airplanes patrolling the no-fly zone. He plotted to murder a former President (George H.W. Bush on a visit to Kuwait). He invaded, without cause, an entire nation in the hope of dominating the world’s oil supply. We once thought we could make use of him, when we encouraged him to invade Iran. We learned, through bitter experience, that we couldn’t. He wanted weapons of mass destruction and had tried to build them. All the world thought he had them, and he would not allay our suspicions. One day we may find the remnants of his programs, dispersed in Syria or Iran. But maybe it would be better if he had had no traces of W.M.D. at all. Then the rogues of the world would know that they have to err well on the side of good behavior. Colonel Qaddafi seems to have learned that lesson.

Yet the peace of Saddam’s world was the peace of the tomb. Its violence was the violence of hell: Athletes tortured for not winning soccer games; brides raped, then killed for catching the eye of Uday (or was it Qusay?); Kurds in mountains villages and Arabs in the marshes, harried and slaughtered for being less tractable than Sunni car dealers.

Read the piece, it's very good.