Why “we” went to war, version 7 or so: Rummy says
You do not defeat Al Qaeda until you stabilize the Middle East, and that’s not possible as long as Saddam Hussein is in power.
(Cited, for other reasons, by Tom Parmenter (Desperado).)
Conservatives by definition have an exaggerated regard for stability, but this is a strange kind of stabilizing; things settle down sooner, in my experience, if kept away from explosions. Anyway, wasn’t Saddam’s state tolerably stable over the previous twenty years?
Stability is a goalpost-moving change from the proposed “democracy” we wanted to bring the middle east. If democracy doesn’t work out and there’s some kind of neo-Egyptian dictatorship in Iraq in the end, they can claim they met their objective.