And another dictatorship bites the dust...

[grysar]

I'd say given the circumstances, the military plan was probably about as good of a balance of effectiveness and humanity as could be accomplished given the circumstances. This would have been much easier with a broad coalition. This would be in part because of the larger military force, but primarily because resistance would probably be lower not because of the greater legitimacy but because the political strategy the Iraqis attempted would have been more obviously doomed. (That strategy, near as I can tell, was to provoke atrocities to put pressure on the U.S. to stop the war and bloody our nose and hope we'll run. Suppressing and intimidating the populace was key too, but it's a hard authoritarian dictatorship, so that's sort of implied.)

Now comes the hard part.