From the post I was responding to:

As to Saddam killing people this is yet another excluded middle argument. You are saying that if we didn't invade then Saddam would have continued to kill lots of people so it was right to invade. One problem is you don't know how many he was supposed to have been killing and whether they did anything to deserve it. Syria and Egypt regularly torture people according to Amnesty international, you didn't seem to mind it when sending Al Qaeda prisoners over there to be tortured. How many radicals does Saudi Arabia and Egypt kill and torture? How many does Kuwait and Israel kill?

Then you have to weigh up how many people were killed by the war itself and had their life damaged in other ways, and compare that to how they would have been before. Then you have to look at the millions dying in Africa of AIDS, wars, and starvation while no one cares much about their lives. It's nice to have this black/white argument that all of a sudden concern for human life was the reason for this invasion, but that obligates to to care about all the other people dying and being murdered elsewhere. Unfortunately they are also in the excluded middle to make Bush look he's saving people's lives. Spend a hundred billion on Africa if you are serious about human life.

Most of the casualties of the last ten years has been from the sanctions on Iraq, which was a bone headed f*ck up over weapons that were destroyed long ago. When you compare what Saddam did to how many the sanctions killed he comes off looking pretty good.

The first Gulf War appears to have been a screw up by Bush I's ambassador who told Saddam the US wouldn't care if he invaded. Then the first war was to fix that screw up and resulted in sanctions that killed hundreds of thousands. The 300,000 you refer to was another screw up by Bush I who encouraged people to rise up and then they got slaughtered.

- The 300,000 might have deserved death. Who knows?

- Heck, there are other dictators out there doing nasty things too. Hey, look at Israel! Look at Cuba!

- Hey, people are dying everywhere, right? Of course, when we are tallying up soldiers dying in Iraq, this argument disappears.

- And yeah, it was all America's fault that Saddam spent hundreds of millions on armies and palaces while his people starved.

If this isn't cutting Saddam a break on almost every issue mentioned in the post, please tell me how the post would differ if he WAS kissing Saddam's ass.