Is Iraq better off now than it was before our criminal invasion? Are we better off for having undertaken this abomination? Is the world a safer place for democracy given our extraordinarily undemocratic behavior?
For all of the dead because of us, who will never be better off and for those living who will never forget what was done to them whether they wanted it or not, one just has to wonder if we are capable of shame.
That we were victimized on 911 no longer impresses the world and never will. We have visited so much worse on so many innocent people that we have squandered our moral credibility, probably forever. If we had intended to permanently destroy any semblance of moral authority could we have done any better than this?

Saddam's worst crimes were those he committed under licence from us: his war on Iran (which ironically the US would still back). His other crimes were of course heinous, but his death toll pales into near insignificance when compared with the tally racked up as a consequence of sanctions imposed by the west when he no longer ranked as someone we could do business with. Many of those deaths were children. Madeleine Albright thought them a price worth paying. Then came our illegal invasion and occupation, an invasion and occupation that not only killed a million or more Iraqis and displaced another four million, but one that denied iraqis their right to remove Saddam himself and choose his successor according to their interests and not ours. So, no, we can never know what Saddam would have done (or what would have been done to him) had we not imposed our interests so lethally - but we know it could not have been worse than our criminal intrusion in another state's affairs.

You are to be commended for even noticing the suffering of the Iraqi people in this illegal war. However, the statistics are even worse than you say. According to Global Policy Forum (and other reliable sources), 1.9 million Iraqis have been internally displaced and 2.2 million have fled the country--that's four million Iraqis right there or 1/7th of Iraq's population. Extrapolating on Johns Hopkins U.'s Bloomberg School of Public Health studies on Iraq mortality, over a million Iraqis have died as a result of this war.

I believe that the best estimate of Iraqi deaths set in motion by the US invasion and war is over 1.3 million. This in a nation of about 26 million in March 2003. The State of California has a population in the area of 37 million. Ever seen the photos of the destruction of Fallujah in 2004? That holy, ancient city of more than 200,000 souls was turned into a bombed-out ghost town with so many dead, there was no place to put many of over 6,000 bodies. I recall an article about a family the soldiers marveled at having survived. But huge areas smashed flat surely held more remains. Snipers picked off families trying to escape in the river.

The people who own and run amerika are sick. It's probably way too late to stop this machine...