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You make some good points. But I think there is room for debate on this:

well, Saddam is a head of state and Iraq is a sovereign nation

The case could be made that an illegitimate despot that maintains power via murder & torture is fair game. I'll grant you that the Dems are saying the same thing about Bush (deluded, of course). In addition, after his invasion of Kuwait & the subsequent war he lost any claim he might have had to demand respect for his sovereignty. In this world, when you lose a war, the victor makes the rules.

I do agree with your comments regarding the fancy verbal footwork used to define the so called WOT. As in most cases, if you are afraid to openly define the problem and state clear goals, your results are going to be disappointing. In this case the constant verbal appeasement of Islam by weak leaders in the west indicates a serious lack of will. I include the Bush administration, its repeated mealy mouthed remarks on radical (hmm, that's redundant) Islam prove to me there is not a serious, long term, defined commitment to fighting terrorism. The most obvious example of this is the deliberate refusal to use any sort of profiling and in the process harrassing our own citizens and restricting our freedoms in order to placate disgruntled Islamics.