You are on the ball. What I've noticed in the anti-war movement in the US, which was over the moon after the Oct 2006 elections, is that it is very dispirited about Iraq, mainly because the number of deaths is declining and the surge has worked, at least, in counter insurgency terms.
My view on the war is that it really had it origins in a change of thinking, in the US Congress, about Saddam Hussein, beginning in about 1985 but got tremendous impetus after Saddam bombed the Kurdish town of Halabja, with a potent cocktail of nerve and mustard gases through 16th to 19th of March 1988. Five thousand women and children died in the repeated attacks and as the gases were mutagenic and carcinogenic many more had, in their bodies, a sentence of awful sickness and death as well as permanent genetic damage.
Dr. Christine M. Godsden testified, before US select Committees, about all this on 22nd April 1988, She is a British specialist on the illnesses caused by toxic and nerve gases, who visited Halabja just after the attack. This was a wake up call for the American politicians and through the 1990s many of the horrific human rights abuses occurring in Iraq were relayed to the Congress. That growing bias against Saddam's Ba'athists led to the Iraq Liberation Act 1998 (during the Clinton presidency).
That of course was before 9/11. If you google it up you will find that it was about regime change in Iraq, not primarily because of WMD, but because of the Saddam Regime's gross abuse of human rights and his belligerence toward his neighbours.
If you read Bush's address to the UN in Sept 2002, one reason stated for going to war was Saddam's crimes against his own people. That part of the speech is almost word for word from the ILA1998, which showed that his was a cross party position and is without doubt a substantial part of the reason why congress gave Bush carte blanche for the Iraq war.
After 9/11 the focus shifted to WMD but in my opinion they were never a threat to the US and its reaction was a little paranoid but understandable in the context. I mean look, even if Saddam had the WMD the NIE October 2002 report said he had the US with its arsenal of weapons could have removed Iraq from the map forever (incidentally the same is true of Iran). Thus the only moral argument, given that Saddam with what would have been horse and buggy WMD compared with the Americans could not harm US citizens on the mainland, is the one laid out in the Iraq Liberation Act 1998.
As far as the prosecution of the war under Rumsfeld's "light footprint" goes, it was a disaster and if that was all the Americans could do they should have left in 2004.
The strategy pursued by Petraeus seems at this stage to have seriously degraded al Qaeda in Iraq, restrained the Shiite militias and brought the Sunnis somewhat into the "fold". There is still a long way to go but it does seem to be turning around.
Should Hillary or any of the likely Repubs (Paul is very unlikely) becomes president there is every chance that the US will stay in Iraq for at least another 5 years, from now. If the Iraq government hasn't started to get its act together by then things could be grim but the opposite, despite Hugh White's prognosis is not impossible.
