Informant38

"What if ... freedom and democracy are just around the corner..."

Juan Cole, making it clear

Still, even Cole won't say it outright. There's this allegiance to moderation, to the moderates, and in that context Sadrists are radicals. But another perspective says the radicals are fighting something truly evil, and moderation isn't appropriate, because it won't work.
Cole says:

"Obviously, what was obnoxious to the American people about Saddam Hussein was not that he was a dictator. Those are a dime a dozen and not usually worth $200 billion and thousands of lives. It is that he was supposedly dangerous to the US because, as Bush alleged, he was trying to develop an atomic bomb. But whatever nuclear program he had was so primitive as not to be worth mentioning, and there is no evidence that Saddam posed any threat at all to the United States' homeland, or would have in his lifetime."

And he stops. Just like Moore did in Fahrenheit 9/11.
But this "war" is not some gigantic mistake, it's a gigantic lie. The next question - who is telling that lie, and why? - is probably too dangerous to ask, for people in the spotlight like Cole and Moore, because the obvious answer to it is that there has been one, and only one, winner, that the bloodshed and destruction have benefited one player out of all those involved.
A simpler question is - why was Tony Blair so rabid for this? It may seem tangential, and it is, as a question, but the answer's central. The forces that were applied, the pressure that was applied, to Blair, to the American Congress, to the American media, all came from the same place.
Who's winning the war in Iraq?
Ask Ariel Sharon.