Most current college students weren’t (politically) conscious in 2003 when we went to war with Saddam Hussein and Iraq. As a two-year-old, I certainly didn’t have an opinion at the time. The United States overthrew Saddam’s regime in December 2003. But building a nation is much harder than knocking one down. We did not withdraw from Iraq until 2011. In those eight years, 4,493 American soldiers died. Tens of thousands more were injured physically or mentally, often both.

The steepest costs of war were forced upon the Iraqi people themselves, those for whom we sought “a better life.” Civilian casualties are notoriously difficult to calculate. However, a 2013 study estimated that over 400,000 excess deaths occurred from 2003 to 2011 in Iraq. More than 60% of these deaths were directly attributable to violence, the rest were associated with war-related issues such as the collapse of Iraqi civil infrastructure. 

In truth, Hussein was a brutal dictator with no concern for the rule of law, an authoritarian who could not tolerate dissent and a thief who used his position as head of state to enrich himself and his family at the expense of the people. Like many nations, Iraq deserved better than the leader they got. But it’s naive to believe that’s why we killed him. 

Hussein’s ruthlessness was not a problem when we supported his war of aggression against Iran. His use of chemical weapons to kill Iranians was no less reprehensible than his use of them to kill Kurds. But we allowed the former and used the latter to justify invading a sovereign nation without U.N. approval. 

In the lead-up to the Iraq war, domestic dissent was marginalized: conflated with support for Hussein, or an........

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