I've viewed this country as having the arrogance to run around and be everybody's babysitter without ever being asked to do so. I appreciate what progress our country has made for its citizens and inhabitants in protecting their freedoms, but I don't expect that everybody in the world should look to the U. S. as a model. That attitude, however, is held by a large part of the citizenry (an estimate more in my opinion than in statistics, admittedly), and by every incarnation of the administration since the early days of the nation, way back in the good ole illegitimate days even.
The Bush administration and its supporters believe they have the right to decide unilaterally who needs punishment. I disagree that they are in the best position to determine world justice, or in the best position to determine who is dangerous. Susan Wright's lecture following the history of making Iraq a rogue state was very useful. My Iraq history has been mostly my memories of the Gulf War "Sadaam Hussein was painted as the modern anti-hero during that period. The Iran-Iraq war was among the last breaths of a U.S. History class, barely worth a mention in the rush of testing. I learned that the main impetus for the sudden transformation of Iraq the nightmares of children's dreams (and such) came first when Hussein invaded Kuwait. At that point, a tradition of regarding any non-Westernized peoples as uncivilized and irresponsible came to be applied to Iraq. So anyone who believes that their entire nation is somehow inherently evil must explain why we did not always recognize them as part of any axis of evil, and for what reasons we chose to do so.
The backdrop of affairs that the September 11th attacks was presented against made it easy for a magical shift of attention back to Iraq following the military action in Afghanistan. By some force that I'm willing to attribute to the tendency of Americans to view the Middle East as homogenous in any degree despite the ongoing conflicts that make it readily apparent that it is not, roughly 50% of Americans in 2002 believe on faith alone that Sadaam Hussein was responsible for any part of the attacks.