Vacancy: Dictator Wanted

I'm in something of a quandary over the situation in Iraq. (A quandary's a sort of luxurious state you can afford to be in when you're several thousand miles away from a problem and no gives a shit about your opinion anyway.) My mind's a-whirl with unanswered questions:

What the hell should we do out there? Why did we get involved in the first place? What convinced Tony that he should play monkey to G.W. Organgrinder? When it was obvious that a majority of people in the U.K. were firmly against getting into this mess, what the fuck, not to put too fine a point on it, happened to democracy? Why are we prepared to hold referenda on things that don't matter and not on things that do? In the future, are we going to just kill people we think are threatening us, or do we intend to try to kill all the bad people in the world? And if we are, shouldn't we all have Special Powers, capes and tight boots? (I'm wearing my underpants outside my trousers already. In fact I started doing that in 1988. Different pants, obviously. I'm not altogether brutish.)

The thing is, I don't see how we can pull out of Iraq in the near future, purely on the basis that, as we fucked it up, we have to stay until it's fixed, and that means more money, more lies, more guilt, evasion, bluster and plain old-fashioned politicking, and, more importantly, lots more dead young people. And if, as is beginning to seem likely, the only way to maintain any kind of order in Iraq is to employ Saddam-like tactics and most of the people who worked for him, why don't we just give him his old job back?