Christopher Hitchens says he asks all opponents of the Iraq invasion this question (among others) and claims it never gets answered:

Do you believe that a confrontation with Saddam Hussein’s regime was inevitable or not?

Tim Dunlop fixes this for Hitchens by answering this question (and the others):

Hitchens himself mentions in the article the long-term interest in regime change shown by people like Paul Wolfowitz (dating from the 1980s), and we know that such a policy was a high, if infrequently mentioned, priority of the incoming Bush administration, so I’d say that a confrontation with Iraq was inevitable once the Bush administration came to power.

And, not knowing that they were responding to Hitchens question I ran across two other folks in the same reading session that also have answers. First, John Scalzi who supported the war:

Indeed, I submit that had 9/11 never happened, we’d still have had tanks trundling through Baghdad one way or another — because Dubya would have found a way to make it happen. It was personal. Saddam was dead meat as soon as the Supreme Court gave Dubya the keys to the White House.”

And second, Jaquandor, who riffed off Scalzi’s post:

A friend of mine who is considerably more liberal than I (!) remarked to me when Bush was sworn in, “How long before we’re at war with Iraq again?” I confess that my answer was, “Probably not that long, I imagine.”

Jaquandor then points to the main reason the bushies are in so much trouble now. I paraphrase: 1) within the administration there was a common goal of invading Iraq but different factions had different reasons and 2) the reasons the administration gave to the people were not their real reasons (plus the reasons given were apparently not quite based on fact). The world we live in does not like dissonance between idea and action and will resolve it with often unpleasant results for the perpetrators.