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Judging from comments people are misunderstanding my question. I'm not wondering why Dick Cheney wanted to go to war with Iraq, or the neocons and the PNAC crowd (though, admittedly, years later I still don't actually know why they wanted to go to war with Iraq). I'm wondering about the support from people I think of as, while not necessarily entirely sharing my worldview, roughly occupying the same political space as I do. I'm talking about the people who bought into the "it's a noble mission to go topple a bad dictator and then rebuild the country as wonderful Democracy as a way of showing the world the power and rightness of American benevolence" line. I'm not sure how many people like that existed in the country at large, but there were certainly a lot of people like that in the world of elite liberal punditry.