E-Kul, let's get one thing straight. You are Australian and some of us are American. Do you see how we could get defensive by the way you word some of your posts? I respect your opinions as a non American, but it does sting us when the obvious anti U.S. slander comes out.
E-Kul should have every right to "sting" us as he does, because despite his ranting and raving he brings up points which must be addressed (alongside reams of false information).
Let's get the falsehoods out of the way first:
The ORB study indicating 1 million Iraqi deaths cannot be taken seriously given that the average total casualty number (coalition + Iraqi) of
all of the other related studies is 215K. This includes the estimates coming out of documents published by Wikileaks in 2010. So according to what Assange himself (E-Kul's hero) can ascertain, nothing close to 1 million people have been killed.
Speaking of those Wikileaks documents, they also indicate the particular nature of the killings, which relates to another falsehood of E-Kul's: far and above, Iraqis have killed Iraqis. This wasn't a Nazi campaign to cleanse the population via genocide; it was a civil war where car bombings, mortar attacks, and block-by-block sectarian violence were responsible for the overwhelming majority of civilian deaths. It is very sad that Iraqis felt that way about each other, divided by religious sect and tribal loyalty (divisions reinforced by Saddam so that he could rule them more effectively), but that is the reality.
This doesn't thereby absolve all responsibility for the civilians that
were inadvertently killed by the U.S. military, nor the abuses -- isolated though they are -- evinced by our forces. It does, however, very much change the character of the war (E-Kul, why aren't you reading what your hero is putting out?).
Now, to the "moral" component of the U.S.'s decision to intervene in the first place: containing Saddam via sanctions may have killed some 500K civilians during the 1990's (this is a high-end estimate). That is 50K innocent civilians per year. Meanwhile, in 9 years of occupying Iraq and establishing a stable regime that no longer threatens its neighbors nor tortures its own people and has at least a modicum of democratic norms, 215K people died, or, a little over 23K per year. So, fewer Iraqis have died relative to the world's previous policy toward Iraq. And this death rate is lower despite being part of a front-loaded flurry of violence that has successfully moved Iraq beyond Saddam for good (in other words, it is only going down from here).
The third alternative, with neither sanctions nor intervention, was not particularly desirable either: Saddam would remain in power and continue torturing his own people, including, potentially, more gas attacks like the ones he carried out on the Kurds in the 1980's, torture/execution for anyone deemed a threat, and conscription into another of his aggressive wars on his neighbors (the Iran-Iraq War -- initiated by Saddam -- killed perhaps 500K Iraqis). This also contained the possibility of his renewing Iraq's derelict WMD program, where documents captured in 2003 indicate Saddam would have used as a cover to act even more aggressively.
This sort of "death calculus" makes some uncomfortable but it is the reality of international politics. There were a bunch of pretty terrible options available to Iraqis, and it is within this conceptual space of terrible options that the Iraq War must be understood. There was no magical alternative that would have seen Iraq flourish and none of its citizens die.
This is why, despite all the violence and loss of life, 77% of Iraqis answered "Yes" to the question, "Thinking about any hardships you might have suffered since the US-Britain invasion, do you personally think that ousting Saddam Hussein was worth it or not?" in August 2006, at the veritable height of violence.
http://www.brookings.edu/fp/saban/iraq/index20060831.pdf (p.51)
