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I doubt that the US ever had the moral high ground. Certainly it did not in the view of Al Jazeera.
The major problem with the US invasion has been its attempts to establish that it has the moral high ground, and to live up to it. Order could easily have been restored if the US had not been trying to be a 'good' invader. All it had to do was destroy all opposition, without regard to whether innocents were being killed at the same time, engage in a policy of torture to find out the information it needed for its purposes. Execute all trouble-makers, potential trouble-makers, anyone that looks like they might be a trouble-maker in the future. Capture and kill Saddam, loot everything of value, and either leave or install a police state.
In other words, act like a traditional invader.
Instead, it has embarked on the task of trying to turn Iraq into a liberal democracy. My view is that liberal democracies work only with a set of cultural underpinnings that do no exist in Iraq, and probably won't for a generation or two.
I fear the US has got itself into a thoroughly no-win situation now. If it stays, there'll be more of the same. If it hands over to the UN, there'll be more of the same and it will be blamed on the US, not the UN.
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