Nice try. We know this is all horseshit. Because even AFTER our invasion and occupation, our own military still found nothing of what was alleged by Powell at the UN General Assembly, so there was nothing "to clean up at the target sites". Saudi Arabia was so unconcerned with any threats from Iraq, they didn't even join the "coalition of the willing" in our invasion efforts. The shear folly of attempting to occupy Iraq was well understood by the VP Dick Cheney when he was interviewed in '94 after the first Gulf War.
BRINKLEY: One other question — it keeps coming up. Why didn’t we go to Baghdad and clean it all up while we were there?
Sec. CHENEY: "Well, just as it’s important, I think, for a president to know when to commit U.S. forces to combat, it’s also important to know when not to commit U.S. forces to combat. I think for us to get American military personnel involved in a civil war inside Iraq would literally be a quagmire." . . . .
. . . and . . . .
"If you can take down the central government of Iraq, you can easily see pieces of Iraq fly off. Part of it the Syrians would like to have in the West. Part of Eastern Iraq the Iranians would like to claim – fought over for eight years. In the North you have the Kurds, and if the Kurds spin loose and join with the Kurds in Turkey, then you threaten the territorial integrity of Turkey. It’s a quagmire if you go that far and try to take over Iraq."
We never had to go into Iraq, but even if we had elected to go in - just to unseat Saddam - we didn't have to bomb their infrastructure into oblivion, we didn't have to put millions of trained and armed military-aged men out of work, and we didn't have to disband their civilian authority. We could have deposed Saddam and left the secular Baathist government intact to find its own way, instead of disenfranchising millions and allowing them to devolve into the fundamentalist Islamists who later formed ISIS.
The risks were well understood beforehand, but it was all done for the profit of the few, at the expense of the many, and at an incalculable cost to the future.