Really, now war is not the worst thing there is, I would say that allowing abuses to go on when there is a power with the will and ability to remove them. There is not the will to remove the House of Saud from power, or the Syrian Government but there was the will to remove Saddam and it was taken and I am very very happy with the result as are the Iraqi people, the majority of Iraqi's in a poll this month said that their lives are somewhat or much better off today than before the war, if isolationists had their way then they would all be suffering under the iron fist of the regime compiled with the crippling sanctions.
The more subtle measures were tried against Saddam for over a decade. Sanctions were used to no avail. The sanctions killed over a million Iraqi civilians. To alleviate the suffering the UN istigated a food for oil program which was rife with corruption and now the facts are coming undone (surprise surprise, many prominent anti-war figures were given the right to sell Iraqi oil on the black market). So you have a program of "peaceful" resistance that was failing outright and fucking up the country and killing vast ammounts of innocent people while the regime became more entrenched and eliminated its enemies. So we had tried all the other methods, they were innefective against this regime, war was a legitimate means to resolve the problem and it was the right thing to do. It is bad to be sure but when you look at the alternative it is the only sane option. Now if we took Basstrap's suggestion of only fighting wars when the human race was in peril we would all be doomed. Leaders wouldn't deal with threats, they would wait, and the threats would grow larger and larger until they truly were able to annihilate the world and we would all be killed. That is an illogical means of dealing with the world, you cannot talk peace with those that do not know the meaning of the word. Likewise you cannot claim peace unless it is a true and just peace and not the peace of the grave or peace of slavery that many here would prefer to see.
Again with the eurocentrism call, honestly I have been called eurocentric, ethnocentric and a dozen other labels just to avoid the one beneath, racist. I do not mind if people wish to label me in such a way because I am simply not, surely there is nothing "ethnocentric" in believing that all people should be free to live their lives in peace, without fear of dictatorships and violence. There is nothing particuarly western in thinking that freedom is the optimal state for mankind. It is not an inherently western concept because it works so well all over the world and the people of the world deserve it. I am rather shocked by the willingness of many to stand by and allow people to die needlessly because it's far removed from their everyday lives, to sit back and say that it isn't our problem and then cry when great crimes take place. This is the same ideology that allows great evil to persist. Would the Rwandan Genocide have taken place if Clinton had had some more backbone after Somalia, would the Holocaust have occured if the western powers had listened too Churchill in the 30's and prepared properly for war in Europe, the legacy of inaction is allways worse than that of direct force.
War is not the apex of evil, it is bad, but it is not the worst thing. War is a means to an end, in this case it was a means to rid the world of the most barbaric dictatorship of the latter 20th Century surely a just cause that was long overdue. Other Measures were tried and they failed (They were not more effective, they cost a lot more lives over 100 times as many as the war and they took a decade before anybody took an altenative course of action), containment didn't work and once taken the suffering caused by a brief war in the name of liberation was less by the first year than if nobody had taken action.
Inaction is the murderous path and knowing now post-war about the regime, the way that they tortured innocents (I repeat, download the Abu Ghraib video prewar and come back to tell me that you can sit back and not take action, the only reason people continue to say Iraqi's are worse off is because the mass media simply cannot show the true face of the regime is because it is so violent and shocking it would give peace protestors nightmares). George W Bush is a better peacemaker and has spread freedom in the world much better than Bill Clinton ever did, GWB has less blood on his hands today than Clinton did at the same point in his term and the war that was won in Iraq is going to be the cornerstone of the liberal democracy throughout the Middle East. I guess I am just one of those "ethnocentric" fools who thinks that Saudi Arabia is an evil regime that should be toppled and that the Iranian people deserve to have a true say in their own country if caring for human rights and standing up for them is ethnocentric then so be it and screw anybody who is progressive and accepting of other cultures.
By the way, the use of saying a place in hell by the side of Hitler was in reference to Dante's Inferno and was an allusion to a literary work and not an expression of religious conviction or beliefs.
EDIT
Basstrap, I presume that you think that Islamism does not pose a threat to humanity therefore the entire War on Terror is pointless until Osama posesses the capacity to kill us all. By abiding to your world view removing the Taliban was the wrong thing to do wan't it? And the US entering WW2 was useless because Hitler didn't want to exterminate mankind, only certain less "racially pure" groups, I mean the US could have allowed a Japanese economic sphere in Asia as well as a Greater Germania if it didn't enter the war, that whole endevour was pointless. And the war of Independence for the US that was technically wrong and unjustifiable because they were fighting for the pointless concept of freedom which doesn't really have an application in the real world. Where does your application of blind moralty towards war end? I suspect that it ends in a world devoid of civilization.