1) Primarily, the oil wealth of Iraq. Too many people (and governments) were willing to continue to pay Saddam for his oil, take advantage of kickbacks, and sell him weapons, in spite of sanctions. And his neighborhood has managed to exert outsized influence on the UN, distorting its purpose, because of the world's dependence on its combined oil wealth.

2) Few other regimes in Saddam's "bad neighborhood" were making the transition to democracy; in fact, rather than being influenced by the only country in the region that is a democracy, they had a longstanding commitment to scapegoat it for their own failures and eliminate it. And because of their wealth they could get away with this attitude for decades. One of the purposes of the Iraq war was to establish a beachhead of democracy in the neighborhood which would start the dominos falling. Whether or not this is realistic (I think it is), the neighbors are sufficiently frightened to fund insurgents and denounce the occupation.

3) Saddam's ambitions were more global than those of the two-bit South American and African dictators she describes. His aggressiveness, financial support of the most fanatical terrorists, and continuing wealth were a lethal combination that would not yield to the kind of shaming from without and challenge from within that have been successful in other places.

Most of the following reasons for invading Iraq could not be addressed by shaming, isolating, and supplying internal resistance movements:

Saddam was in the cross-hairs for a bunch of reasons -- he was a tyrant of worst sort who richly deserved to be removed, he was a nutcase who seemed to be becoming increasingly detached from reality who was sitting right next to the whole world's oil source and could raise holy Hell with the world economy by attacking the Saudis or other countries in the area, he was not immortal and we were afraid of the country falling into civil war disrupting the oil supply when he died, he supported terrorism ( in Palestine, for example) which is currently a big no-no, he seemed to be working on very worrisome weapons, he was dissing us by shooting at our planes in the no fly zone and thumbing his nose at us in a part of the world where it is dangerous to appear weak, we had already passed a law calling for his ouster (in 1998 under Clinton), he was in violation of the peace treaty that ended the first Gulf war, he was in violation of many UN resolutions, his country seemed relatively weak and easy to conquer (compared to Iran or NK -- God help us if we ever have to invade NK), our military was ready to finish him off and had been preparing and planning to do so for a long time, his country seemed like a good lodgment in the region for a military base as a way to put pressure on Iran and Syria, taking his country was a way to end our military basing in Saudi which was provoking problems there and which was unwanted there and which was insecure there, taking his country would put the fear of God into the Arabs who considered us weak and perhaps make them more cooperative, taking his country might allow us to gather intelligence regarding terrorism and the clandestine trade in WMD components, taking his country might draw in terrorists whom we could kill or capture there rather than on our own turf, and finally taking his country would allow us to try to go after the "deep causes" of Arab hatred of us by giving them the chance to have some kind of democracy or at least civilized order to live under -- the most ambitious part of the whole thing. I'm sure there are other reasons not listed above.

As they say, a war against Saddam was "over-determined".

Finally, 4) Has the West been as willing to shame (and cut off funding to) the Arab tyrants as it has been to shame those of Eastern Europe, Africa, and South America? Western opinion-makers certainly haven't romanticized Arab despotism more egregiously than their earlier counterparts did the huge Communist enterprises of the 20th century (it would be difficult to), but a lot of the admiration for Communist dictators died down as those regimes crumbled or mutated. Has the Western leftist's love affair with the Arab world run its course? For example, the EU is still funding and excusing Arafat, in spite of internal efforts to expose his misuse of their money.

(While we're on the subject of nation-building, a UN official suggests that the poor Iraqis should suffer under the same fractious, paralyzing, identity-driven parliamentary system as Israel. Oy.)