It is interesting that you never hear the left concede that in Saddam's current status (i.e. absence from power) there are people now alive who would otherwise have been victimized and probably brutally murdered were he left in his former role as ruler of Iraq. The question of how many, of course, would only be a guess, but it seems reasonable that the guess would be based on his history. As I understand it, beyond Saddam's war with Iraq, his biological attacks on his own people, and his invasion into Kuwait, his despotism also lead Iraq to a decade of sanctions and UN fraud contributing to a high percentage of severe poverty among his civilian population.
Good point. Anti-war radicals rarely admit in public that their own estimates of internal death counts during the sanctions era was 5000 children a day. Most experts think these were exaggerated statistics. But if they were in any way true then the war would have been fully justified as relief from this death rate.
But again, this is never the radical left's point. Statist democide is always defended due to some pathological fascination with possible socialist utopias.
There is no way to equate current iraqi difficulties with the rate of death under Saddam.