Some human rights groups, and Saddam himself, claimed that 5,000 children a month were dying under sanctions. I had my doubts about this number back then, but the same people upset about civilians dying in this war now took that number as gospel. The objective was to get us to drop the sanctions, of course.

More reasonable analysis can be found in a 2002 article here. He comes up with a guess...and I will readily conit is a guess...of about 100,000 deaths due to the embargo on Iraq.

Had the situation been left as is, in perpetuity, how would that have worked out?

Drop the sanctions? If there was one thing that all the reports from the weapons inspectors agreed on, it was that Saddam would have restarted his programs once the heat was off. Then what?

I don't see any plausible long-term scenarios that would not have had us dealing with Iraq on a military basis eventually. Politicians love putting things off so that someone else ends up holding the bag. I suppose Bush could have done the same thing.

BTW, I don't use derogatory terms for the Iraqis, or Muslims in general for that matter.