Saddam can be held responsible for about 2M deaths, with his various wars, civil wars, daily repression, and etc. That's an average of 7,000 a month -- far more than any month of the post-liberation chaos and so-called "civil war." Iraqi deaths have now fallen to about 200-300 a month, which makes them fairly normal for countries in their GDP per capita range.When it comes to Iraq, what ever America's intentions may have been, removing Saddam was better than leaving him in place, even at the cost of war.
http://www.icasualties.org/Iraq/index.aspx
Meanwhile Iraq's GDP has tripled, supply of electricity, water, and sewage service has doubled, there are one hundred times as many cell phones as pre-war, and the number of cars has probably tripled or more.
Additionally, Iraq now holds elections, allows political parties, allows political speech, allows political demonstrations and has hundreds of independent TV/radio/newspaper media. They have begun to establish independent courts.
http://www.brookings.edu/saban/~/media/ ... /index.pdf
I could go on. The genocide of the Marsh Arabs has stopped. Torture (real torture with drills and acid and hot irons, not waterboarding and loud noises) and rape rooms are no long official policy.
Iraq is far, far, far better off today. And yes, that was always the plan. Freedom and prosperity in any country are the result of a lot of hard work.
I hate to break this to our non-U.S. friends, but we don't see much reason to worry about what the rest of the world thinks. We've been ably defending the Western world for the last century or so, aided by our immature lack of Europe's sophisticated justifications for Nazism, Fascism and Communism.that makes the rest of the western world look on the US as immature and unsophisticated,
People forget we're not only the reason Japan and Germany don't have militaries anymore, but also the only thing that kept Stalin from pouring through the Fulda Gap. Before you criticize our interventions, take a minute to stop and think what the world would look like without them.