But even if you disregard that, we know Saddam was not a nice man, but do you seriously think that if he had stayed in power he would have killed more people since 2003 than were killed due to the war and instability his removal caused?
There's a decent chance that if the status quo had continued until the Arab Spring era, there would have been a Syria-like civil war. Between that and the sanctions, would more people have died than have died IRL? I don't know.
There's also the question of what the US would have done if an Arab Spring-type insurgency arose in Iraq in either the 2000s or 2010s in a scenario where the US was still enforcing the no-fly zones.
I've heard the argument that the Arab Spring would not have happened absent the Iraq War; I don't agree with that assertion, since the political landscape of the rest of the Arab World wasn't significantly altered by the Iraq War.
I honestly think that if Saddam had still been in power in 2011, Iraq by that point would have just been a Middle Eastern version of North Korea: politically isolated from its neighbors and the major Western powers, and economically disastrous due to external sanctions and internal kleptocracy. I could see him more or less preventing social media from taking hold in his country, which would have made it considerably more difficult for opposition groups to organize.
It would be interesting to see how Saddam would have reacted to the Syrian civil war, since he despised the Assads.
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