Bush has admitted:
1. No WMDs have been found
2. They have found no link between Iraq and 9/11
Both of those were just things they said to get approval for a war they wanted to do anyway. They had to get the US troops out of Saudi Arabia, and felt that they needed a friendly government in the region and so they chose to 'regime change' Iraq. Regime changing SA, Iran or Syria would have all been fine but those were not politically sellable.
If the Bush Admin are no longer pushing the WMD and 9-11 link thing....then it is pretty obvious it never existed.
Although I am a supporter of the war, I agree with California Dreamer that WMD and any specific connection to the 9/11 plot were hyped.
However, we didn't go to war because we needed a friendly government in the Middle East to park our troops in, although years from now we may look back and see that as one good outcome.
This is about projecting American power into a region that has been subjugating it's own people through tyranny, whether secular or theocratic, stealing oil revenues to fatten the friends of the regimes while using educational and religious institutions to brainwash it's populations with virulent anti-American and anti-Israeli propaganda that shifts the blame.
Only a thorough political reconstruction of the region offers the possibility that the press, the schools, the mosques and other institutions that have been hijacked by corrupt and extremist influences can return to their more natural function of serving and educating the population.
There really is no choice - we're not going get anywhere with a strategy of chasing bands of militants through the mountains and into villages that they choose because they're friendly to them.
A strategy of regime change, military stabilization, and quick return to political self-rule is the right way for America to wage this war, as the sole remaining super-power, and as a nation with a system of government that guarantees basic rights for it's people.
It's not all that different than World War II, except that we're fighting sub-government elements spread out over multiple tyrannical regimes. It is, in fact, classic liberal foreign policy - only after Vietnam, the right and left have changed sides, and now we call it neoconservatism.
