Iraq War
I can't speak for others, obviously, but the fact that there are legitimate reasons for action in Iraq and the Middle East generally (like, is the UN even *thinking* about stopping Israelis and Palestinians from blowing each other up?!) doesn't mean that either invasion/slaughter will help anything nor that unilateral action will help anything.
That is, the US is effectively giving a giant, ``fuck you'' to the UN (which I think has far more to do with this than "control of oil"; see http://www.newamericancentury.org for example) via the illegal (according to large numbers of lawyers, notwithstanding the British Attorney General) invasion of Iraq. The hundereds of billions the US plans to spend on the slaughter and "reconstruction" (like Afghanistan?) of Iraq could be far more effectively spent with an "invasion" of education, reconstruction efforts (e.g. the water and sewage systems which were systematically targeted in the first Gulf War) and peace-keepers/human rights observers [1].
This would lead to a real democracy much more quickly than any amount of high-explosive ordinance; democracy isn't putting an X on a piece of paper every five years, but all the comingled practices leading up to such a thing (which we're rapidly and blithly ignoring ourselves) like reasoned and robust debate. This implies a robust media situation (i.e. more than a handful of "infotainment" conglomorates), meeting of basic needs (i.e. so one may have time to "robustly debate" things rather than "robustly search for one's next meal") -- implying health care, affordable food, affordable housing, civic engagement (i.e. cloistering politicians in bizarre rituals like leadership pow-wows doesn't help), ...
Will crushing economic sanctions hurry such things along? Will the annihlation of the remaining flimsy infrastructre of Iraq hurry such things along?