Taste my steel, Iraq wasn't a religious dictatorship. In fact, religious extremists hated Saddam because he was a secular leader. Saddam was a tyrant, a paranoid meglomaniac, and a dictator, but not a religious one (Now, Muammar al-Qaddafi and Ruhollah Khomeini, on the other hand, ARE religious dictators)
So, on the one hand, we have a dictator who indiscriminately oppressed his own people, killing any who resisted or opposed him.
On the other hand, we have invasion by a foreign power, occupation of the country, execution of anyone thought to pose a threat to the invaders, a puppet government, civil war, and, finally, a religious dictatorship.
At the same time, we have the latter situation from the p.o.v. of the rest of the world:
The most powerful country on the planet decided to invade a third-world country (which posed no threat to the invading nation) halfway around the planet from itself, on the pretext of that country's continued violation of international regulations. However, the evidence jused to justify it was not sufficient to convince the U.N. Security council, of which the invading nation is one of the most influential members, to take action (and, in fact, most of the "evidence" was known at the time to mostly be a sham.) Then, when the original reasons for the invasion were shown to be bogus, the leaders of the invading nation said "oh well, it needed to be done anyways", a tacit admission that they invaded a sovereign nation and removed its leader from power for no reason other than their disagreement with that leader.
Not exactly a good precedent (or method of making global decisions), regardless of whether one good thing came of it or not.
