Would you say ultimately beating the Nazis absolves Stalin from the guilt of his hideous mismanagement (and I'm not even referring to the actual purges and terror campaigns here...) ? I know I wouldn't. "The end justifies the means" was never my thing, especially if the "means" was incompetence, brutality and so on and so on. I'm largely in the opinion that if Iraq gets back to its feet the thanks go virtually entirely to the Iraqis themselves for having managed it despite the best efforts of the idiots in White House...