Absolutely- If by "genocide" and "regional war" you mean something completely different from genocide and regional war. Just like how Johannes uses scare quotes.

Beyond that:
I take your estimations of the death rate from the 90's under Saddam about as seriously as you take the most hyperbolic estimations of 2003+ civilian casualties related to the war. I think you play 'Calvin ball' when it comes to the facts you want to argue with. hyperbolic accounts of casualties on one side of the argument are- what do you call it? 'Foam' and 'Maggots flying', or whatever your cute-ism of the day is. Hyperbolic accounts of the conditions in Iraq prior to march 2003? Fair play.

Now, of course, to just cover your default retort: Nobody is suggesting it was a child's garden of grass. It was hell, to be sure. But oppressive mass murder of citizens by a regime (most of which was carried out while he was an ally of ours) is most certainly not genocide and it is absolutely not regional war, by any fevered stretch of the imagination.

as to the rest: its more 'lets play pretend!'

You can't support yourself on reality, so you tap fantasy.

What if lizard like aliens had invaded the earth during the middle of WWII!? What if White Supremacists had shipped AK-47s back in time to the confederacy!?

Like Turtledoves amusing beach reads, we can entertain ourselves with the consequences of what didn't happen, but quite simply: what we did do was stupid, on its face, was not an adequate solution to the problem we faced, and I could go on- But I won't.

Now- here is where you declare smug victory because I won't play with your toys. Please do so, and spare me the same old rhetorical circus of insanity- as you continue to insist you have some insight or something to offer- because (agan and for the 1000nth time) EVERYTHING YOU HAVE SAID ABOUT IRAQ FOR FOUR YEARS HAS BEEN WRONG AT EVERY TURN

Yeti