I am doubtless blinded by ideology, but it seems to me that the case for war in Iraq doesn't come off any better when stated forthrightly by an advocate of that war than it does when I viciously caricature it:

Bush faced two realities: He was not dealing with a nation state that could be defeated by military force, and his attackers could not be deterred by fear of retaliation -- they had to be arrested and incarcerated for an indefinite period, or killed. Even this, however, would not be sufficient. The al Qaeda ideology springs from failed societies and a failed culture; as long as the conditions that produced this cancer continued to exist, it would not be possible to eliminate the threat of further attacks.

What Bush needed was a strategy that included both a military and an ideological response. The military response was to deprive al Qaeda of bases and training resources; the ideological response was to deprive it of support in Arab and Muslim lands. To accomplish this, Bush chose to use the idea of freedom and democracy -- the American ideology -- as a weapon. Iraq was a target not only because it was a potential source of weapons of mass destruction for the terrorists and a threat to the stability of the region, but because its population was well educated, relatively secular in outlook among the Arabs, and one of the Arab populations most likely to be capable of self-government.

That's from the American Spectator's running What Would Reagan Do? debate.