1) I was for getting Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda. At the time wasn't sure we could nation build Afghanistan. Plus, we weren't broke.

We were always broke. Every cent spent in both OEF and OIF has been financed with deficit spending. That's not bad in and of itself, but don't pretend that we were sitting on a big pile of money in 2001 that we've simply burned through by 2009. There was never any big pile of money, and we were going in the hole from day one.

2) I feel I was duped with the WMD argument but I didn't think that was the only reason to invade Iraq.

Too bad for you. Before the invasion began, Tony Blair dispelled the last of my lingering doubt as to whether or not we'd find WMD. He gave a speech in which he said that Iraq had the ability to strike at London with a nuclear weapon. My thought was, "Really? And your solution is to put his back against the wall with no way out? Bullshit." See, nuclear weapons are intended to deter conventional invasions. I know we used them against Japan, but their primary utility since then has always been to factor the threat of overwhelming retaliation into the enemy's cost-benefit calculations. The fact that we were willing to invade was all the proof I needed that we never really believed he had a credible CBRN option, and given the state of his military it seemed logical that he hadn't been working on one for a while.

I would have gone with your second option, personally. Saddam was our ally for so long because having a secular power in Iraq was useful to us as a hedge against Iran. And while he did invade Kuwait, he was nice enough to ask our permission first. Also, given the demographics inside Iraq, with the Shi'ites outnumbering the Sunnis by such a huge margin, the Iraqi people themselves could have taken down Saddam's regime on their own if they'd felt like it. I would have favored supporting any internal revolution (that looked like it might benefit us) with weapons and money, but invading the nation ourselves was the wrong move. Imagine if France had invaded America in 1775 to get rid of the British, and then set themselves up as an occupying power. How well do you think we would have liked that? What the French did was help our own revolutionaries by sending money and ships and troops and some brilliant commanders, more to slap the British than anything else, and then they didn't hang around to try exercising any political control over the development of our young republic. The revolutionary spark was ours alone. And remember that our first government, defined by the Articles of Confederation, was thrown out after about a decade. And we had a Civil War! Imagine if the French had stayed around to try and stop those things from happening. See where I'm going with this?

I'm not saying that humanitarian intervention and military options don't have their place, but we chose the worst possible path in Iraq. We most certainly did not have to invade.