I have written this down here for posterity, so I can reference it without re-typing it each time...

Saddam has been killing people all along, through warfare and by direct means, such as torture and execution. My own estimate of this number came out to at least 75,000 per year killed under Saddam. As an independent confirmation, Iraq also seemed to have a much lower population growth rate than neighboring countries, apparently confirming that Saddam was doing in his own people at a good clip, year after year.

So I estimated that even if we (regrettably!) might have killed up to 100,000 innocent civilians to remove Saddam from power, by the second year, this would result in a net savings in human life, much less henceforth. Of course the real number seems to have been well under 20,000.

Second, I judged that even another despot (say, a guy like Syria's Assad) wouldn't kill as many Iraqis, and I gauged that guys like Saddam and Stalin are rare. So, while I'd prefer Iraq to have a democracy, I think things will still have been improved even if we leave them with a typical mideastern dictatorship, a petty despot. And, sadly, though the "insurgents" are now killing many more Iraqis (about 10,000 so far), this is still is a much lower number than Saddam's annual death toll.

Then there are the international policy implications. Remember: each action sets a climate which determines future reactions. By allowing Saddam to continue "get away" with things, such invading other countries and remaining in power and (everyone thought) developing WMD, or at least resisting inspections, we sent a message to other dictators: Do this, and you'll get away with it. So it was very important for the UN to follow through on it's own promises not tolerate any resistance to it's inspection program.

It would have been better if the entire security counsel had seen the wisdom of this position and followed through with their own promises and threats. But lacking that, I'm glad a group of countries stepped up to the plate, and brought some consequences. Too bad we had to see that "international law" is a sham, and that the UN consistently promises one thing, but does another.

Fourth, sanctions weren't working well, but lifting them would have been bad also. The benefit of sanctions was that (we now know) that it did seem to temporarily halt Saddam's ability to pursue his favorite hobby: accumulating WMD and other weapons to fulfill his dream of ruling the entire mideast. But sanctions, we are told, also had a tremendous toll on innocent human life -- prominent spokespeople on the left said as many as 50,000 children were dying annually under sanctions. So we couldn't let this suffering continue indefinitely, but we also couldn't let Saddam back into business. From this point of view also, I saw deposing him as the only remaining alternative.

Likewise, if we pulled out now, I think it would have grave consequences, both by increasing Iraqi deaths, and by sending the message (as happened inadvertantly when Clinton pulled out of Somalia) to Islamic radicals that we were a paper tiger and could easily be beaten, emboldening more to sign up for radical Islamic causes. And the Iraqis seem to agree, saying, in poll after poll, that they want us to leave, but not quite yet.

So that was my analysis: I judged deposing Saddam to be the right action, saving more lives in the long term, even if it had regrettable elements, such as some loss of innocent life. But we don't really get to choose an option in which innocent life isn't lost. Often, every option results in some number of innocent deaths, and we must do the best we can to minimize that ultimate, unfortunate number, and refusing to decide or act is in itself a choice we are responsible for.

This analysis seems to have held up so far: the insurgents are not killing 75,000 per year or more, Iraqi lives have been and are being saved, hospitals and schools are re-opening, in most areas, children are not starving, and actions from leaders Ghadaffi (giving up his own WMD program) and Assad (who pulled out of Lebanon) seem to have shown positive effects on the mideastern political climate.