Some Americans say no, others say yes, but I will refrain from answering directly and instead let the reader decide.
The Iraqi Ba'athists came to power in a coup in 1968. Saddam Hussein, a megalomaniacal hit man for the Ba'ath regime, became vice president after the coup.
Saddam Hussein betrayed Iraq's Kurdish citizens, the country's largest minority, in March 1975 after his regime had signed an autonomy agreement with them five years earlier, on March 11, 1970.
After the mysterious death of the Ba'ath Party's President Ahmed Hassan al-Baker in 1979, Saddam purged all his opponents in the Ba'ath party and declared himself president. The next year, he invaded Iran, taking the country into an eight-year war that killed more than one million people.
Even though he bore responsibility for over a million deaths, his atrocities against the Iraqi people continued. No opposition to Iraq's dictator was tolerated. In the early 1980s, Saddam announced on Iraq's state-controlled TV station announced that anybody opposing his regime would be considered a foreign agent and sentenced to death.
In 1983, Saddam's forces rounded up more than 8,000 Kurds from the Barzani tribe alone and sent them to an unknown destiny. In 1987, he launched a genocidal campaign against the Kurdish citizens, calling it the Anfal Campaigns, during which his army rounded up close to 200,000 Kurdish citizens and destroyed over 4,000 villages.
On March 16, 1988, the Anfal campaign culminated in one of the most brutal mass murders ever conducted, when Saddam used chemical weapons against Kurdish civilians in Halabja, a town south of Suleimaniya City, instantly killing over 5,000 civilians, mostly women and children, and injuring 20,000 others. Tens of thousands died in later years suffering from the effects of those weapons. For more information, please see this Web site: http://www.kdp.pp.se/ chemical.html.
The Kurds of northern Iraq were not the only Iraqis to suffer. In the south, Marsh Arabs' marshes were drained, practically destroying an ancient community. Thousands of Shiites were executed under the pretext of being sympathetic to Iran or being affiliated with other, non-Ba'ath groups.
In 1990, Saddam invaded Kuwait, but was defeated by a U.S.-led international coalition. When Iraqis revolted against Saddam, his forces launched brutal revenge killings with tanks and helicopters against the Kurds in the north and Shiites in the south.
After Operation Iraqi Freedom, hundreds of thousands of bodies were uncovered in the hundreds of mass graves that litter Iraq. According to the Kurdistan Regional Government's Minister of Human Rights, Dr. Muhammad Ihsan, so far 278 mass graves have been discovered in Iraq. Dr. Ihsan said that in one mass grave, he saw more than 1,000 bodies. For more information, please visit http://www.usaid.gov-/iraq/pdf/iraq_mass_graves.pdf.
Other crimes of Saddam include:
1. Enforcing a 12-year embargo of food and electricity in northern Iraq, after the Kurds launched an uprising against Saddam after the first Gulf War.
2. Conducting a notorious ethnic-cleansing campaign in the areas of Kirkuk, Khanakin and Sinjar. Saddam displaced the Kurds and brought non-Kurdish citizens from other parts of the country and settled them in their place, creating ethnic problems that exist to this day.
3. Giving $25,000 to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers, even though Iraqis suffered from poverty and minimum salaries.
4. Teaching anti-Semitic texts in schools and encouraging children to hate Jews. Students had to study Charles Dickens' "Oliver Twist" and Shakespeare's "The Merchant of Venice" because in both stories the bad characters are Jews.
5. Banning the Internet and satellite televisions from the public because Saddam wanted the Iraqi people to live in a big prison. If you were accused of being anti-Saddam, your tongue would be cut off and/or you would be executed.
During Iraq's liberation, the Iraq army did not fight the coalition because it wanted outside intervention to Saddam's rule. Without the help of the United States of America and its allies, the Iraqi people would not have been able to topple his regime.
Today, due to Iraq's long, loose borders, foreign terrorists and saboteurs (agents of some of the neighboring dictatorship countries of Iraq) allied with the remnants of the Ba'ath party in Iraq are terrorizing Iraq. They are killing people, both Iraqis and the allied forces, because an Iraqi democracy might create "a domino effect" in the Middle East. Naturally, this is not in the interest of the dictators who rule the countries around Iraq.
It is important to remind my fellow students here that their brothers and sisters in Iraq are not only fighting foreign terrorists and remnants of the Ba'ath party, but also forces from a number of countries to keep the war on terror far from America.
Let me mention some positive changes that took place in Iraq after Operation Iraqi Freedom.
1. A large middle-class society reappeared in Iraq. Salaries increased and the Iraqi currency did well against the major world currencies.
2. Iraqis watched satellite TV and used Internet caf?s for the first time in their lives.
3. Iraqis began to practice freedom of expression and religion for the first time in decades.
4. Kurdish-controlled areas in northern Iraq are the safest and most friendly area for Americans and Westerners in the entire Middle East. The democratic experiment that this region began in 1991 became a model, not just for Iraq but for the entire Middle East as well.
5. Hundreds of newspapers and magazines are now sold in Iraq's streets, unlike under Saddam when only a few Ba'athist papers were on the streets.
6. Democratic elections will be held early next year, and a ruthless dictator joins Stalin and Hitler in the dustbin of history.
So was the war worth it or not?
