Salon has an interesting interview with The New Yorker’s Seymour Hersh right here.
I found his comments about no one in the Bush administration actually lying when talking about WMDs and such very interesting; they just were true believers.
I think he’s certainly got a big chunk of the picture (and certainly better first hand sources than I do) but I suspect not everyone involved was as idealistically motivated as Hersh seems to believe. Some were. Wolfowitz certainly and I can see Bush himself falling in that category. But there are too many conflicted motives for other players. They may have bought into the democracy domino theory but it was incidental to other agendas.
In fact, I see the factors leading up to the invasion of Iraq as more of a ‘perfect storm’ of radically different agendas (Rovian metapolitical, commercial (oil, government contractor, military-industrial, freemarket zealot), neoconservative (including pro-Israeli, neoimperialist, and democracy-by-force impluses), Religious Right, Rumsfeld’s new military, finishing ‘old business’ and getting even, etc.) converging on one action: attack Iraq and rebuilding it into an exemplar state proving conservative principles, and validating Rumsfeld’s modernized military, while securing an oil supply and making lots of money. I think some believe and cared more about the whole democratic aspect of this than others.