"Yucky?" If you were the one who had been raped and tortured for uttering a vaguely anti-Saddam sentiment, or whose family members had been disappeared, or whose village had been wiped out, or whose brothers, sisters, and children were now being used as human shields, or... or... or... you wouldn't speak so flippantly. For someone who likes to place himself on the side of the world's conscience against the US, that's low hypocrisy of the worst kind, in addition to being a shameless obscenity.
You are also incorrect about the terms of the '91 ceasefire and related UN resolutions. Saddam agreed to cease repressing his own people - and his failure to do so led to the original justification of the "No-Fly Zones" maintained in the north and south of Iraq. It is to our great shame that we did not immediately set about more actively enforcing these and other ceasefire terms, and instead left the matter to the inattention and conflicting agendas of the same international organization, the UN, that proved itself much worse than useless when confronting war and genocide in Yugoslavia and Rwanda, among other places.
It is not just for these reasons that Saddam cannot just be seen as an "Iraqi problem," however. Saddam gained and expanded his power first and primarily as a Soviet client, and later as a Russian client and trading partner. Direct American financial and military aid and contributions to his regime were rather minimal by comparison, and British contributions, though larger, were only a fraction of what was provided by France and Germany. All of us, however, share guilt toward the Iraqi people for supporting Saddam, because our policy of looking away from regimes such as his while they live off the petrodollars we pay them is what has enabled him to retain power, arm his regime, oppress his people, attack his neighbors, and nurture his and his followers' dreams of a pan-Arab, anti-Western empire.
This battle, and the larger war of which it is a part, has been inevitable at least since the fall of the Soviet Union, but probably since the first European power established its first colony in North Africa. The result resembles a war of imperial break-up, similar in this respect to the Yugoslavian wars of the 90s.
Aside from our moral or historical responsibility for the situation - something which alone would be very unlikely to move us to act short of some new Rwanda-like catastrophe - there are two main reasons that we can't afford to let "nature take its course," and for regimes such as Hussein's or the Ayatollahs' to erode, implode, or burn themselves out in wars against each other: Oil and weapons of mass destruction. (Note: Syria shares some features in common with Iraq, but its lack of its own oil wealth is probably the major reason that it is not as great a threat and has not received primary attention.)
Oil gives these regimes unnatural longevity and unearned wealth - it makes them able to survive and to build up their internal power without ever offering their own people (outside of military and security elites) a better way of life. The same accident of geography and economics places these deeply dysfunctional and innately militarist regimes at a critical center of world energy resources.
The existence of weapons of mass destruction means, and may virtually ensure, that the ambitions and conflicts, and even the eventual death throes of such regimes would pose intolerable threats to other nations, either directly or through the provision of such weapons to the terrorist entities that grow up in the region as another direct result of the political conditions that "peace" activists would like us to consider to be other people's business.
Any attempt to define or judge the current conflict apart from this larger historical context is likely to get lost amidst simplism, thinly veiled self-interest, and political prejudices. That Europeans, other international observers, and their domestic counterparts are content to use Iraq as a platform to project anti-Americanism is depressing for many Americans. For the past, present, and potential future victims of Saddam's regime, it's something much worse.
