Sorry, but that's an ahistorical statement.
When the US threatened Saddam, we had just come off finishing off the Taliban. GWB was taken seriously.
The PROBLEM, in a nutshell, was Chirac and the French. The French, and their actions in the UN security council, were seen as a life preserver to Saddam, and gave him hope that he could wait out GWB's political offensive and survive.
The actions of the French made the US "surounding Iraq" tactic fail to dislodge Saddam, and made the invasion inevitable.
Let the shame lay where it deserves.
This is true at more than one level. In the late nineties France and Russia both signed multi-billion dollar oil development contracts with Saddam that were worthless while sanctions continued, and worthless if Saddam were forced out of office. When I saw that, I knew and predicted, really anyone could predict, that Saddam was coming out of his box. Sanctions were on the way out, the only question was how best to orchestrate it.
And so the PR campaign commenced about all the millions of dead Iraqi children caused by sanctions, ad nauseum, ad infinitum.
In fact, the biggest problem to ending sanctions is that everyone was making so darn much money off of them. Finally Saddam threatened both France and Russia that he would cancel the contracts if they didn't get off the dime.
This means, for anyone paying attention, that Saddam had already bought off at least two members of the security council, as well as UN administrators. When Bush entered office I believed then that war was Bush's only choice, and I read remarks he made during the campaign and the early days of his presidency as indicating (to me at least) that he fully understood that war was necessary. It was never about WMD, it was about the fact that sanctions were on the way out. It was take him down quickly, or face an empowered Saddam returning to the world stage with UN, Russian, and EU backing.
But you can't really explain that publicly, so you blab on about WMD.