Even if you ignore the increased freedoms, opportunity, and democracy that are growing in that former despotism, just based on casualties alone, Iraq is better now.
Strategypage comments on the official Iraqi death count for 2006:
The fighting is more and more Iraqis versus Iraqis, with some 95 percent of the dead in 2005 being Iraqi. While the media highlights those days when there were a hundred terrorist deaths, that was not the norm. On average, about 36 people a day died. But a day with no terrorist deaths is not considered news, and is rarely reported. Some 11 percent of the Iraqi deaths were security forces. That's 1,543 dead, compared to 832 American. No one is sure, but perhaps a third of the civilian deaths were terrorists, or those involved in supporting the terrorism. In 2006, most of the dead were Sunni Arabs (civilians and terrorists).
So about 12,500 civilians dies and about 4,000 of those are enemy combatants. So 8,500 civilians were truly victims of the war. And these are divided between Shia and Sunni Arabs who are increasingly the targets of each others thugs who bomb or visit in the night to kidnap and kill. Add in the security forces and we have 9,000 victims of the war. That's about 25 victims per day.
Don Surber (via Instapundit) comments on the Saddam-era death toll:
Hussein's carnage averaged 70 to 125 civilian deaths every day for the 8,000 days he reigned. His 20,000 civilian deaths a year (on average) were considered "peace" while last year, under war, there were 14,298 civilians deaths.
It seemed like peace because the Baathist killing of Iraqis was done quietly without pyrotechnics. People would be rounded up day in and day out while our press corps ignored it to maintain their Baghdad Bureaus. On the surface, life went on. And if one of your family members disappeared you knew better than to ask the government what happened. You kept quiet. Besides, who would you tell? The reporters only talked to the English-speaking Sunni Baathists and preferred to report on Saddam using a Whitney Houston song as his official "reelection" music.
Flurries of mass killings under Saddam would be over quickly and then forgotten by our press.
Now there is a steady drip of fewer but louder and better reported killings that scare everyone whether they are in the combat zones or not.
And under Saddam, the Sunni Baathists were doing almost all of the killing. The Shias and Kurds weren't killing Sunni Arabs because they were without arms, training, or external support (well, to be fair, the Iranians supported Sunni Kurds in Iraq during the Iran-Iraq War). Still, whether they were being bulldozed into mass graves, gassed from the sky, tortured and killed individually, or dying in the army for Saddam's ambitions, mostly Shias and Kurds died under Saddam.
Now the killing is divided between the two sides (Shias and Kurds versus Sunni Arabs) and increasingly it is Sunni Arabs who are dying as the Shias grow in strength and refuse to just take it. I'm not happy about the revenge killings because it hinders politcal progress, but the Sunni Arab "plan" for victory actually counts on provoking the Shias into killing Sunni Arabs. The Sunni arabs are quite literally getting what they asked for.
Under an elected government, Iraq is definitely safer for Shias and Kurds, less safe for Sunnis, and safer overall. And resources are no longer showered on the Sunnis to the exclusion of the Shias. Even the Kurds who escaped Saddam in the 1990s are better off now since they don't need to constantly worry about Saddam breaking out of his box and sending the troops or bombers in to wreak havoc.
But it is louder today under democracy than under Saddam when victims died quietly and the press looked the other way. So those among us easily distracted by shiny objects are only paying attention now.
I'm damn proud of what we've accomplished in Iraq already. I am confident that we can finally defeat the killers who fight on for their hideous causes, and achieve even more.
