Well he was a fairly awful dictator, big military spender, ethnic and political repression, very corrupt and nepotistic. What gets tossed on either side of the scales measuring whether Iraqis are worse off as a consequence of intervention? Infant mortality rates, life expectancy, electrical power delivery, telephone lines, export revenue... Saddam ruled for 3 decades, if the Iraqis endured him that long, he couldn't have been all that bad?
A conservative estimate suggests as many as 300 thousand Iraqis lie in unmarked and scattered mass graves as victims of atrocities. Saddam may have averaged 'only' about 10 thousand innocent civilian fatalities per year, but each was more wrongful than the harm to the average intervention/occupation victim. Some estimate over twice as many innocent Iraqi civilians have died as a consequence of intervention and occupation. If this were what got tossed on the scale, Iraqis are worse off as a consequence. I think the insurgents and relateds are liable for a substantial portion of the total civilian casualties in Iraq, but would hold the US liable for all of them (minus about 10 thousand per year) since absent occupation that is the way it would break down.
Iraqis are worse off in many other ways, there is non-governmental sectarian violence, criminal impunity, religious fundamentalism, foreign terrorism and military occupation. The aim ought to be to create the circumstances that allow the Iraqis to assume control of a substantial measure of their own country with an adequate infastructure.
The obstacle is the insurgency and associateds, be they righteously indignant Iraqi patriots, foreign martyr wannabees or Iranian military advisors. The jugular to the whole operation is reconstruction and this is the Coalition's weakest point. I don't understand how the impact of insurgency wasn't taken into account when planning for recostruction. All sorts of problems flow from this apparent lack of consideration; de Baathism would mean doing without the expertise of masses of trained and expert professionals; retaining rather than retraining the Iraqi military is the more important problem. If they are useless, why keep them, but if you let them loose, what will they do? My answer is profitably apply them to the reconstruction effort, and that any delay makes it more difficult.
But my point wasn't that Saddam was an awful tyrant, rather than that he was heavily armed and dabbling in precluded weapons. Saddam was not adequately contained, he acquired billions of dollars worth of weaponry, despite embargoes and inspections:
