Trying to rehab neocons or "liberal hawks"

Folks are rightfully teeing off on NYT's Roger Cohen trying to rehab the neocon legacy by essentially saying that if you didn't support the Iraq invasion you are essentially a supporter of Stalin, Hitler, or whatever atrocious dictator that we fought against. First off it seems to completely ignore that we haven't done much against plenty of other really bad guys such as Mugabe, the various Chinese atrocities, Burma, etc. Secondly in the same vein as Yglesias, just because your desired ends are good it doesn't excuse the actual ends achieved. Put in other words, reality bites. Finally, I find it odd that no one talks about the actual nature of Iraq before we went in. Mainly I was thinking of the Kurds who were the worst victims of Saddam: they were already semi-autonomous in part due to the air cover provided by the US. So we already had shielded one entire population from possible brutalities. While Hussein still had a terrible impact elsewhere in Iraq (secret police and the like) there was no killing fields type of catastrophe that required an urgent poorly planned invasion