we approached Baghdad, Coalition forces lead by America agreed to a ceasefire from Saddam Hussein. We did not want to invade Iraq. It would have been much less trouble to allow Hussein to remain in power despite of the abysmal human rights record that the Iraqi government had maintained.

This Ceasefire came with certain conditions established by the UN. In the years that followed, 17 of these UN resolutions contained in the Ceasefire were violated many times. The United States spent 14 months debating returning to Iraq and engaging Hussein again. Keep in mind that the United States did not try to conquer Iraq and expand its land holdings unlike what Iraq did with Kuwait. They did invade Kuwait with the intent of taking the oil fields of Kuwaithas deteriorated into a civil war. In short, they didn't know their enemy. They couldn't tell the difference between the pro Sadam Sunni militias who fight to re-instate their old way of life, and the Islamist militias who fight to instill their own expansionist ideology in Iraq. They didnt seem to realise that Saddam was one of Osama bin ladens key political adversaries, because he acted against the Islamist idea by building a secular, pan Arabist state. They didn't know that they would all fight each other at the first opportunity, and they didnt realise that all of these groups are united by their hatred of the US/ They generally believed that the whole population of Iraq would accept democracy as their new system of government. If they