As of 2023, 61% of American citizens now oppose the invasion of Iraq [1] as the war moves into what seems to be a long distant memory of a far different time. Initially, in the period succeeding 9/11 and preceding the Iraq War, Americans found intervention very favorable. Over time, however, the warmth of the general public towards the Bush administration’s decisions have soured. There were multiple reasons listed by the United States government for the Iraq War:
The disarmament of Iraq WMDs (weapons of mass destruction)
An end to Saddam Hussein's support for terrorist organizations
Humanitarian concern for the Iraqi people, and the intent to free them from Ba’athist oppression
Bringing Saddam Hussein to justice for crimes against humanity
Now, the American people look back on these justifications and feel deceived as thousands of innocent Iraqis (and American troops) died in the process of this effort, and to boot, as it seems, there were no weapons of mass destruction discovered by the intervention. Finally, a terrorist state (Iran) now controls Iraq as a client state and the United States seems to have done nothing to aid reconstruction. On the other hand, let us be completely clear. The Bush administration never claimed, contrary to popular opinion, that the Ba’athist dictatorship of Saddam Hussein had any hand in the events of 9/11— Rather, its gripe was that Iraq had become a central host to Islamist terror organizations in the Middle East.
Life During the Saddam Years
Under Saddam, the quality of life of the Iraqi people dramatically declined. Iraq’s per-person income sharply fell fro $3,121 USD from 1980 to 2002, from being more prosperous than Spain to in greater poverty than Angola. Public services were neglected, and the education system focused on completely indoctrinating the youth in the most vitriolic and divisive cancer [2].
In 1998, all female secretaries were fired from their governmental positions and women were barred from leaving Iraq without male escorts. In 2000, women were blocked legislatively from laboring outside of their homes. Political opponents and their relatives were kidnapped, tortured and raped by the state. The Mukhabarat, a branch of the Iraqi Intelligence Service, would rape the relatives of suspected opponents, record it and send it to suspects as blackmail. Often, female relatives of prisoners would be killed in front of them to coerce confessions [5].
General al-Salihi reported that on 7 June 2000 he received a telephone call from Baghdad and was told to go and collect a “gift” from a store in Amman. This consisted of a video tape showing the rape of a female family member. Ten days later he reportedly received a call from the Iraqi Intelligence Service. He was asked if he had received the gift and was told that one of his female family members was in the hands of Iraqi Intelligence. He was then again urged to stop his activities. General al-Salihi, during an interview with the Special Rapporteur, stated that he was willing to surrender the video tape only at the trial of a top Iraqi government official.
From an interim report of the UN Special Rapporteur on the human rights situation in Iraq [3]
Saddam Hussein attempted to exterminate the Kurds through the Al-Anfal campaign, using the mobilization of mustard gas, sarin gas and VX (all of which are WMDs). The death toll of this genocide could not have been less than 50,000 individuals according to the Human Rights Watch [7]. Non-Arabs were excluded from Iraqi society and hundreds of thousands of Kurdish men, women and children were displaced [4]. Foreign news broadcasts, satellite dishes, modems, and fax machines were banned by the Ba’athist dictatorship as well.
Iraq under Saddam attained more foreign debt per capita of GNP than any other nation on the planet. $124,000,000,000 USD was owed to other nations and foreign corporations. Throughout all of Iraq there was not a single credit facility, food rations needed to be imported, productivity stagnated, and only 5,500,000 individuals had access to safe drinking water out of Iraq’s population of 25,000,000 people. The sewage systems were a disaster, and any electricity generation which Baghdad was able to attain was due to confiscating and redistributing electric power from the rest of Iraq, which was left with a maximum of 12 hours of electricity per day. There was no independent judiciary, no free or responsible press, public services were on the verge of collapse, and the Shia population was left with particularly underfunded health and educational infrastructure [2].
Throughout his time in power, Saddam Hussein funded and backed countless acts of international terrorism. In 1993, the Iraqi Intelligence Service attempted to assassinate former President George HW Bush and the Emir of Kuwait [36] [37]. Saddam sheltered the Mujahedin-e-Khalq Organization (MEK) during its time as a terrorist organization before its political moderation, as well as the Palestine Liberation Front known exclusively for sabotaging civilian aircraft, and which was responsible for killing an elderly disabled US Jewish civilian named Leon Klinghoffer [38].
"We had heard gunshots and a splash." Giovanni Migliuolo, the Italian Ambassador to Egypt, later chillingly reconstructed the event: "The hijackers pushed (Klinghoffer) in his chair and dragged him to the side of the ship, where, in cold blood, they fired a shot to the forehead. Then they dumped the body into the sea, together with the wheelchair."
Terrorism: The Voyage of The Achille Lauro - TIME [38]
Saddam sheltered the Abu Nidal Organization (ANO) and its founder as well. In fact, Abu Nidal was so closely interlinked with Ba’athist interests that the ANO would find its foundations beginning within Iraq itself. The ANO, over the course of its existence, killed and injured over 900 individuals across 20 different nations. Saddam incentivized Palestinian suicide bombings by rewarding the families of suicide bombers up to 25,000 USD [39]. A branch of the Iraqi Intelligence Services known as “Directorate 14” which cooperated with the MEK [41], was being headquartered at the Salman Pak facility which gave training to Palestinian, Syrian, Yemeni, Lebanese, Egyptian, and Sudanese operatives in carrying out espionage and assassinations, managing explosives and attaining training in marksmanship [40].
In short, if you would like to stop reading here you can. The case is clear cut. Saddam Hussein was a terrible dictator who gassed his people and emulated a form of terror and forced conformity that even Adolf Hitler could have only dreamed of, emulated in his systematic Ba’ath Party Purge. The individuals in power which Hussein enabled were completely corrupt and monstrous, such as his son Uday Hussein, a murderer and a serial-rapist [10][11]. The Iraqi people lived horrible lives, and their nation was economically crippled by Saddam’s own ineptitude.
This was clearly a humanitarian crisis, and it was our moral duty to not simply stand by and watch. This is indisputable. When a people do not have the resources to resist the oppression of their despotic government, the international community must respond swiftly, particularly those powers who have the undeniable ability to do so. In response to the genocidal terror in the North against the Kurds and the Shiites in the South, No-Fly Zones were instituted in 1991 to prevent the Ba’athist dictatorship from flying within the zones of these ethnic groups.
Weapons of Mass Destruction
The UN Inspection Process
In the years following the invasion of 2003, the question was posed: Where were the weapons of mass destruction mentioned relentlessly by the Bush administration? The public seems to have found its answer by now, unanimously agreeing that there indeed were none. The primary justification in invading Iraq was the presumption that they held weapons of mass destruction in violation of Security Council Resolution 687 [8], which stated:
…Iraq shall unconditionally accept the destruction, removal, or rendering harmless, under international supervision, of:
(a) All chemical and biological weapons and all stocks of agents and all related subsystems and components and all research, development, support and manufacturing facilities;
(b) All ballistic missiles with a range greater than 150 kilometres and related major parts, and repair and production facilities;
On April 6th of 1991, Iraq accepted its position, bearing the resolution, and began relinquishing its WMDs, or so it seemed. In June, the UNSCOM (the United Nations Special Commission) began its first chemical weapons inspection. Iraq declared 127,941 special munitions to inspectors. The fate of thousands of unfilled Iraqi special munitions was completely undisclosed to the inspectors, while hundreds upon hundreds of filled special munitions were entirely unaccounted for by inspectors as well [9]. Was suspicion not already merited?
3 tons of bacterial growth material for biological weapons, 40kg of casein (enough for the formulation of 1,200 liters of concentrated botulinum toxin), 80kg of thioglycolate, a bare minimum of 520 kg of yeast extract (sufficient at the lowest estimates as they stand to produce 26,000 liters of bacillus anthracis spores), and 1,100kg of peptone (enough to create 5,500 liters of concentrated perfringens agent) were all left completely unaccounted for in the inspections by the United Nations [9]. Given appropriate storage conditions, according to the UN, the yeast extract and peptone (the most dangerous items) could have been usable by at least 1999. We still do not know what happened to almost all of this unaccounted material.
All Iraqi biological weapons were declared as destroyed by their own accounts by July of 1991, however there remained as late as 1999, no certainty regarding the quantity of WMDs destroyed or the conditions or location under which such destruction of WMDs took place. For example, the Iraqi government’s recollection of the destruction of the Al-Hussein warheads which contained chemical weapons changed with almost every new inspection team and there was never a single scrap of evidence provided to confirm Iraq’s claim of the complete destruction of these warheads [9].
On weapons the team concluded that the material balances and their sub-components (production, filling and destruction) declared in the FFCD for biological bombs (R-400) and Al-Hussein warheads, could not be verified. Furthermore the account in the FFCD on biological spray devices, modified drop tanks and the aerosol generator (Zubaidy device), could not be verified. … The material balances for bulk BW agents and their sub-components (production, filling, losses and destruction) for all declared agents (Clostridium botulinum toxin, Bacillus anthracis spores, aflatoxin Clostridium perfringens spores and wheat smut) could not be verified. … The media material balance and its sub-components (acquisition, consumption, losses and destruction) could not be verified.
THE LETTER DATED 27 JANUARY 1999 FROM THE PERMANENT REPRESENTATIVES OF THE NETHERLANDS AND SLOVENIA TO THE UNITED NATIONS ADDRESSED TO THE PRESIDENT OF THE SECURITY COUNCIL [9]
At every step, the Iraqi government continued to sabotage the inspections of the UNSCOM inspectors at Iraqi sites. By March of 1995, Iraq provided the United Nations with a second Full, Final and Complete Disclosure (FFCD) of its illegal weapons programs which was banned in 1991. By July, however, Iraq admitted for the first time, after evidence discovered by UNSCOM, that they had indeed been running an offensive biological weapons program, while denying the weaponization of this weapons program.
In August, Saddam Hussein’s son-in-law, Hussein Kamel, the former Director of Iraq's Military Industrialization Corporation, defected from the dictatorship, forcing Iraq to provide its third, final FFCD, as it admitted to having created more than 30,000 liters of anthrax and other agents for biological weaponry, previously completely unknown and unaccounted for by inspectors. Soon Iraq withdrew the FFCD, subsequently admitting to having weaponized its biological weapons program after previously denying this and lying to UNSCOM, also admitting having achieved progress (previously unknown to the UN) in developing its long-range missiles than it had ever previously made public.
By October of 1997, UNSCOM finished destroying large sums of equipment used in the creation of chemical weapons, which Iraq had denied producing using for that purpose until a few months prior in May, when Iraq admitted that some of the destroyed equipment had indeed been used in the production of VX. Going into January of 1998, Iraq was still notably obstructing the attempts at inspections.
By October of 1998, Iraq completely ceased cooperating with UNSCOM in their inspections, and Security Council resolution 1205 was passed which unanimously condemned Iraq’s non-compliance with the inspections [12]. The fact is that Iraq was not genuinely inspected in any meaningful way. UNSCOM expressed in its records that the Ba’athist dictatorship built dummy facilities to deceive inspectors, bulldozed military sites, refused to allow inspectors to interview scientists, and concealed accumulations of chemical & biological components. Iraq’s possible disposal of WMDs without UN oversight would be a violation of the UN resolutions as well.
UNMOVIC, the successor to UNSCOM, was unable to verify Iraq’s claim to have destroyed roughly 50 Scud-type warheads (which were intended to be used as chemical or biological weapons) and a 50-ton trailer, initially imported for Iraqi use as a mobile missile launcher. Baghdad failed to remain consistent in recounting the number of special warheads it had to UNMOVIC, and while the Iraqis claimed to have only manufactured 50 chemical and 25 biological warheads, UNSCOM had previously fallen under the apprehension that well over 100 special warheads had been produced, while it only verified the destruction of roughly three quarters of those special warheads [15].
At this point it should have been impossible to believe that Iraq had completely abandoned its nuclear pursuits. Iraq consistently weakened inspection abilities & resources through hiding information and equipment between 1991-1998 and doing so at the cost of a great loss in income from potential oil exports which were otherwise hindered at this point by international action which had cracked down on the Iraqi economy during this period as Iraq refused to comply with UNSCOM.
Abd al-Tawab Mullah Huwaysh recalled that Saddam Hussein had, sometime in 1999, taken an interest in what was essentially an implication to restart Iraq’s chemical agent production. Huwaysh reported that within six months he could begin to produce mustard gas for Saddam Hussein while VX and sarin would take much longer to manufacture. In 2001, Saddam approached Huwaysh again, inquiring, “Do you have any programs going on that I don’t know about?” It couldn’t be clearer that Saddam had interests in restarting his WMD program, but later evidence will show that it’s hard to believe that he hadn’t already resumed sarin production at this point. By early 2002, Qusay Hussein, the son of Saddam Hussein, asked Abd al-Tawab Mullah Huwaysh to jot down a list of Iraqi biological weapons experts, supposedly to supply to Bashar Al-Assad.
The Iraq War
Scott Ritter, an Iraqi sympathizer and member of the UN inspections, pointed out something very important, which would later come back to shoot him in the foot. Sarin has a shelf-life of no more than five years. By even 2002, even if Iraq had maintained old sarin gas from 1991 under proper storing conditions, the sarin gas from a disbanded weapons program should have been nothing but “harmless goo” as he put it, and therefore, if Iraq did stop sarin production in 1991, it would no longer be volatile by 1996 [13]. It should be noted that Sarin does not last past a few weeks on its own without proper conditions.
Keep the previously iterated fact in mind. Keep in mind as well, that Iraqi insurgents could not have possibly created VX, nor sarin gas, which they did in fact use (as in one instance of 41 Sakr-18 rockets recovered from insurgents by Polish forces [14]), and which they could have only come into contact with if they were given it by Saddam Hussein’s regime. Surely, the munitions utilized did date back to a pre-Gulf War time (as the UN Addendum states [14]), however these munitions were not kept in appropriate storage and were extremely degraded when recovered. If Ritter’s statement regarding sarin is true, then the rulings of the Addendum which stated that the residual sarin was not provided by the Ba’athist regime to insurgents cannot be correct and the sarin within the munitions could not have been that old at all, regardless of the fact that the munitions used by insurgents was. This is due in large part to the fact that sarin needs to be stored in appropriate conditions to be able to last its full lifetime, and these munitions simply were not.
Furthermore, some may object that Syria may have provided the Iraqi insurgents with sarin. This, however, is extraordinarily unlikely, as it was regime-loyalist organizations such as Fedayeen Saddam, which were using sarin, organizations which Bashar Al-Assad loathed— not Iraqi insurgent groups which Syria was sympathetic to.
Where did this sarin come from? There are two options:
There was an Iraqi sarin production facility which Ba’athist troops destroyed during the Iraq War
OR
A sarin production facility had been given to the Ba’athist insurgency which was eventually destroyed as well.
Sarin could not have otherwise been used. We should not be too disheartened by the fact that mobile WMD production facilities which had been reported by eyewitnesses were never found, as the Iraqis (as demonstrated through the UN inspections) seemed to have a hard enough time keeping track of their own materials as it was. The assertion that the Iraqis would destroy evidence of WMDs is frequently scoffed at. After all, it seems awfully “convenient” to spectators that once the United States invaded, the evidence for WMDs just up and vanished.
In addition to the discovery of extensive concealment efforts, we have been faced with a systematic sanitization of documentary and computer evidence in a wide range of offices, laboratories, and companies suspected of WMD work. The pattern of these efforts to erase evidence - hard drives destroyed, specific files burned, equipment cleaned of all traces of use - are ones of deliberate, rather than random, acts. For example … All IIS laboratories visited by IIS exploitation teams have been clearly sanitized, including removal of much equipment, shredding and burning of documents, and even the removal of nameplates from office doors.
STATEMENT BY DAVID KAY ON THE INTERIM PROGRESS REPORT ON THE ACTIVITIES OF THE IRAQ SURVEY GROUP (ISG) [16]
However, it clearly did happen. The evidence of sanitation done by the regime remains as clear as day. Furthermore, plenty of regimes have done this scrubbing in the past. The Third Reich, for example, burned its documents and further evidence of crimes as the Allied Powers marched through Germany, including much evidence of the Holocaust.
The question then stands: If Saddam had WMDs still as late as 2003, why did Saddam not utilize them himself against the US invasion? Simple. Saddam personally expressed that he feared retaliation by America if he deployed chemical weapons on them as early as 1991 during the Gulf War. He had been told that the deployment of WMDs on American troops would be disastrous for Iraq. On top of this, the deployment of the WMDs which Saddam had access to would have easily been counteracted by American troops, who do have easy access to anti-WMD military technology. Insurgents using sarin shows not a deliberate attempt by the Iraqi Army to use WMDs on American troops, but rather a breakdown in military command control. Iraq expressly did not want to use chemical weapons on US troops ever since the Gulf War in 1991. Iraq’s WMD program was for Iran, not the United States. On the other hand, this does show that the insurgents did know of where sarin gas had been stored by the Iraqi military which allowed them to deploy it.
On May 17th, 2004, a 155mm artillery round filled with 43% pure sarin gas exploded near American troops, the first of many instances of sarin gas usage in Iraqi bombs [17][18][20], as between 2005-2006 a shocking discovery would be made. Through Operation Avarice, 400 Borak rockets were bought from a secret dealer, a rocket model which was manufactured in Iraq during the late 1980s, which was now internationally banned, which had previously been unaccounted for by the UN. The purity level of the sarin reached an average of 13%, while some sarin weapons recovered in 2006 had a purity level of 25% [19], meaning it had to have been made in any case well after 1999.
In instances other than sarin, 5,000 chemical weapons previously unaccounted for by the UN in their inspections was discovered in Iraq and, for a time, covered up by the US government, as they were attempting to find an active WMD program after 9/11 [23], meaning that even if they hadn’t had an active WMD program, demonstrating yet again that Iraq very much intended to retain their weapons arsenal to restart production as soon as the world was no longer looking.
Other than in 2004 during Polish & American encounters with sarin gas being used within old shells, not many more direct contacts between troops and sarin gas were made. Or so it seems. In 2013 it became known through a report that many new vets from the Iraq war at the time were suffering from Gulf War Syndrome [21], a disease known now to be caused in many cases from exposure to nothing other than sarin gas [22].
After the fall of Baghdad, the backyard garden of Iraqi nuclear scientist Mahdi Obeidi was uncovered. 12 years prior, under orders from Qusay Hussein and Hussein Kamel, Obeidi had buried the components of a nuclear centrifuge in his back yard, with the order to be ready to begin construction of a nuclear bomb again in the future. Obeidi handed over the buried documents and centrifuge components to US officials after leading them to it [24]. Clearly not only had Iraq not given up its nuclear ambitions, but given another few years, it very well may have fulfilled them.
Reconstruction of Facilities
The Foot and Mouth Disease Vaccine Facility in al-Dawrah, one of at least two biocontainment level three facilities in Iraq, which it admitted to the UN had been utilized as a biological weapons facility, had initially been closed down. By 2001, however, Iraq announced its reopening as a simple vaccine facility, without UN approval. UN inspectors from UNMOVIC inspected the facility and discovered that it still retained capabilities for a dual-use function. On top of this, some of the facility’s equipment had been notably relocated to a secondary facility, which the UN had no follow-up on [25].
“During the inspection, the team learned that some equipment had been transferred to another facility,” spokesman Hiro Ueki told reporters in Baghdad. “This was immediately followed by activities at a small veterinary medicine facility about 20 kilometres north of Baghdad.”
Iraq: UN weapons inspectors probe sites related to germ warfare and nuclear arms [25]
The US reported in its “AUTHORIZATION FOR USE OF MILITARY FORCE AGAINST IRAQ RESOLUTION OF 2002” that Iraq was seeking to purchase “chemical weapons agent precursors and applicable production equipment” and was “making an effort to hide activities at the Fallujah plant, which was one of Iraq's chemical weapons production facilities before the Gulf War”. When the United States invaded, thousands of Ba’ath insurgents flocked to Fallujah, when reasonably they should have been at Baghdad while it was under siege, but they weren’t. Defending the palace at Baghdad would have been the only reasonable option unless the insurgents were hiding something (as they heavily resisted the arrival of US forces there).
The insurgents defended Fallujah for eight months before their defeat, during which time the 1920 Revolution Brigades and Ansar al-Sunnah appeared in Fallujah as well to defend the location alongside Al-Qaeda, the Islamic Army and the Ba’ath Party. If there was nothing of extreme value worth defending and ensuring Americans couldn’t have gotten their hands on over the course of the eight months Fallujah was barricaded, why did the Iraqi Army position the Major General Muhammad Latif in charge of the city, and why was the Chief of Staff of the Republican Guard, Jasim Mohammed Saleh, put in charge of prior to Latif’s leadership in the city?
This is why: As of February of 2003, at the Fallujah chlorine plant and three other plants, Iraq amassed multiple times more chlorine production (22 tons per day) than needed for civilian water treatment, demonstrated by the fact that chlorine (which can be used in the creation of mustard gas and nerve agents) was being heavily diverted for military purposes. N. Katturajan, the project manager of NEC Private Engineers LTD, which built the Fallujah plant, confirmed that it was intended during its construction to be controlled by the Ministry of Military Industries of Iraq according to the ministry’s own reports to Katturajan, a strange department to be in charge of the ownership of a chlorine plant [26]. On top of this, NEC provided Iraq with “titanium vessels, spherical aluminum powder, titanium centrifugal pumps and industrial cells with platinum anodes” which it was investigated for having done illegally [27]. Yet another nail in the coffin for the conclusion that Iraq had indeed restarted, at least on some notable scale, the production of chemical weapons.
By September of 2002, the Iraqis had also rebuilt structures which had been dismantled by UNSCOM at their al-Mamoun facility, structures originally designed for the construction of solid propellant motors for their now-illegal Badr-2000 missile program [28]. NEC also had ties to the facility through its production of ammonium perchlorate meant for these solid propellant motors. The former Al Furat gas centrifuge manufacturing facility, bombed in 1998 by the Clinton administration, was also being rebuilt by October of 2002 with no intentions publicly disclosed by the Iraqi government for the reconstruction. However, one doesn’t need to ponder for too long, what planning behind the reconstruction of a gas centrifuge manufacturing facility may have held in mind as a goal [29].
In short, Saddam did have weapons of mass destruction, and nobody should allow themselves to be told that he did not. His nuclear program was defunct for the time, but it certainly would not have been for long, as the evidence shows from what we found buried in Obeidi’s back yard. It was our duty to ensure that the despotic Ba’athist dictatorship in Iraq did not have even more time than it did in its period of international non-compliance, to recalibrate its chemical and biological weapons program on a large scale, and to ensure that it did not succeed in reestablishing its nuclear program, not only for the sake of the Kurds and the Shia community, but for the world as well.
Life in a post-Ba’athist Iraq
Was it all worth it in the end? This may boil down to a point of personal concern. Some rather dull isolationists have no distress for the suffering of those who reside outside of their own individual nations, but for those who care about standing in solidarity with our fellow human beings across the globe, it is undeniable that the intervention, even if there were no weapons of mass destruction, was absolutely worthwhile for the Kurds and Shias [6], if not for a vast amount of the general Iraqi population.
Some may object, however. Was the cost of life worth it? George Gallaway protested with this in mind:
The people who invaded and destroyed Iraq and have murdered more than a million Iraqi people by sanctions and war will burn in Hell in the hell-fires, and their name in history will be branded as killers and war criminals for all time.
British MP George Galloway on Al-Jazeera: Calls for Bush, Blair, Koizumi, and Berlusconi to Stand Trial | MEMRI [30]
Although civilian casualties in any war should never be underemphasized, the fact is that not 1,000,000, but 122,000 recorded deaths during the Iraq war happened to be from civilians. At least 11,000 of these deaths were due to anti-occupation forces and Iraqi insurgents while about 44,000 deaths were due to post-invasion criminal activity, with the rest attributable to either unknown or coalition-led forces. This information was compiled by the Iraqi Body Count, opposed to the popular Lancet death count which recorded 601,000 violent deaths, a flagrantly invalid number [31]. The Lancet report was discredited by not only the Bush administration and the top US commander in Iraq, but Iraqi officials as well [32].
Were the horrors worth the outcome? By February of 2006, $2.43 billion USD in funds had given the Iraqi people food, water and medicine, $10.5 billion had been put towards the Iraqi economy, national security and political spheres, free democratic elections had arrived, and between 2002 and 2005 the GDP grew from 18.9 billion USD to 33.1 billion USD [2].
A new stable currency allowed Iraq’s Central Bank to slash inflation down to -6.3% by October of 2009 [33]. Iraq has now had the vast bulk of its debt forgiven from the Saddam era [34]. The Iraqi people had 43.7 million cellphones as of 2022 after having only a few dozen thousand in 2003, indicating a massive expansion in consumer power [35]. By February of 2006, we had constructed and reconstructed water treatment plants for 2,700,000 Iraqis and sewage plants for 4,900,000. There were far more benefits provided in the areas of agriculture, immunization, etc [2]. Beyond these benefits for future generations, the world as a whole became safer when Saddam was deposed from power. We no longer need to worry about the curation of a nuclear program in the hands of the Ba’ath Party, nor any other WMDs.
Today, over 74% of Iraqis finally feel safe walking alone at night, there has been a 12% decline in the percent of Iraqis perceiving themselves as suffering since at least 2008, and the amount of wellbeing experienced by Iraqis has increased by over 10% since then. One cannot imagine that Iraq would be seeing this progress (albeit incremental and slow) if the Ba’ath dictatorship was still in power today. Although the present situation is not ideal, and Iran presently controls Iraqi politics in large part, hope remains for the future [6].
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