Noam Chomsky remarks:

“Among Western intellectuals, it is a virtual axiom that the US goal — sometimes Bush’s ‘messianic mission,’ as the elite press puts it — is to bring democracy to Iraq, the Middle East, and the world. Critics in the liberal press (e.g., the New York Review, American Prospect, etc.) agree that it is a noble and generous vision but object that it is beyond our reach, etc. Iraqis apparently see it differently. A few days after the President affirmed his noble vision to rapturous applause in Washington last November, a poll in Baghdad was released in which people were asked why the US invaded. Some did agree with near-unanimous Western elite opinion: to establish democracy. 1%. 5% said it was to help Iraqis. Most of the rest gave the obvious answer, dismissed with some hysteria here as a ‘conspiracy theory’ or with some other intellectual equivalent of a four-letter word: to control Iraq’s resources and to reorganize the Middle East in the interests of the US and its Israeli client.”