Well I actually said I was a huge opponent of Iraq and I've been so from the start.
I get that - but I still don't get the reasons behind your comparison. ;)
But at the end of the day the failure of Iraq was fundamentally one of incompetence, there were certainly lies and criminal acts, but I believe the core motive of the people in charge was to help the Iraqi people.
That's kind of a very dubious claim - and one that rests more on personal bias than anything proveable... I see the US in much less of a rosy light, given how they, you know, installed Saddam there in the first place. And then supplied him with WMDs so he could kill the very rebels the US proclaimed to now side with.
Unfortunately expecting them to perform a useful intervention in Iraq was a bit like asking an elephant to run a daycare, an act of dubious value that was fated to end in tragedy.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions. I'm sure that trying to help is going to be a real comfort to all those who died - or have to live in constant fear thanks to their country descending into civil war.
In short: given the absolute mess that Iraq became, I wouldn't care about the intentions of the US - even if I really believed they were doubtlessly altruistic to begin with...
The reason why I found Crimea to be MORE objectionable was because Putin has no noble motive. It's land theft pure and simple, made on a pretext so flimsy it makes Iraqs WDMs to be as common as sand. And while the body count has been low it runs the risk of war in an otherwise stable part of the world and significantly escalates the tension between the West and Russia, the long term consequences of the Crimean invasion could be far worse than those of Iraq.
Land theft is kind of a misnomer. There are very important navy bases in Crimea - ones which the Russian navy kept using after the USSR dissolved... and which they must've felt in danger after their puppet government got kicked out of Ukraine. Not that I approve of this move - had enough of Russia sitting around here for fifty years - just saying it's a whee bit more nuanced than you make it seem like.
As for reactions and fears... the world is only up in arms because we are reminded of the Cold War. If China decided to annex parts of Mongolia, I could tell you what would happen: a big, fat nothing. Ukraine is too close, and the bad memories with Russia are too recent. But this was really to be expected; after the NATO continously expanding east and losing Serbia, Iraq and now Ukraine... of course Russia would react in some way.