Was it worth it?

Writing in Salon, Nir Rosen asks the big question: did the invasion make things worse in Iraq? His answer is not exactly encouraging:

Those spared Saddam's prisons and executioners may be better off, though they have not been spared the American prisons, or attacks, or the resistance's bombs, or the death squads of the civil war. The Kurds are certainly better off, on their way to independence, benefiting from their relative stability and improved economy. The rest of Iraq? In many ways, things are worse. Under Saddam the violence came from one source, the regime. Now it has been democratically distributed. Death can come from anywhere, at all times, no matter who you are. You can be killed for crossing the street, for going to the market, for driving your car, for having the wrong name, for being in your house, for being a Sunni, for being a Shia, for being a woman. The American military can kill you in an operation, you can be arrested by militias and disappear in Iraq's new secret prisons, now run by Shias, or you can be kidnapped by the resistance, or by criminal gangs.

Americans cannot simply observe the horror of Iraq and shake their heads in wonder, as if it were Rwanda and they had no role. America is responsible for the new chaos in Iraq, which began following the invasion and the botched and brutal occupation. Iraq's people continue to suffer under the American occupation and civil war, just as they did under the American-imposed sanctions and bombings before the war, and just as they did under the years of dictatorship. Once more they are mere victims of powers they cannot control. Saddam is out and the Americans are in, but Iraq is still a republic of fear.

For those who supported the war on the basis that it would topple a brutal dictator from power and thereby improve the lot of the Iraqi people, this can only be regarded as one thing: a failure.