What's submitter's beef? That the AP reported the news?

The handover took place. Violence occurred. Both deserved to be mentioned. No causal links are drawn in the article.

the_gospel_of_thomas: And if you had a time machine, you could go back and change the past, so we never went in, and Saddam "kept the peace" in Iraq.

The options of "doing nothing," as some conservatives like to put it, and of not attacking Iraq as we did in March 2003 are not mutually exclusive, as was pointed out by many in the lead-up to war. You know this.

People like to phrase it, "Don't you think we're better off without Saddam in power?" In a sense, yes--it's good when a dictator is off the scene. But there are marginally more successful ways to remove a dictator AND provide stability (which was certainly a goal of the US) than the path our government chose. Some of these would have left Saddam Hussein in power for a longer period of time, but that's the tradeoff, and clearly many Iraqis don't think they got a bargain in that deal.

I'm not going to argue over the rationale for war, though. We went in, for better or worse, and things have gone pretty sour since. These are objective statements. They don't cheapen our initial good intentions, but intentions don't count for everything.

It's like running for president. Doing so is considered one of the most noble endeavors an American can aim for, just as the war in Iraq and the removal of Saddam Hussein was a noble endeavor in principle. But you don't run for president if a) you don't have a good strategy for winning and b) you don't have a good plan for how you'll effectively govern afterwards. It's too expensive (in more ways than financially) to do so without such plans. Noble goals without proper planning and proper intentions mean nothing.