This opinion piece is so one-sided it is hard to take it seriously as journalism. Saddam Hussein was the worst mass-murderer in Middle Eastern History, with a toll of more than a million of his people, continuing right up to when Iraq was liberated. This is not a U.S. story, this is what the French found and published in a comprehensive report in 2005. Saddam has chemical weapons used against his people and in invasions (plural) of neighboring countries. The French, the Russians, the British, the U.N. all thought he had WMD in 2003, and he is thought to have moved some of them to Syria as the liberation began. Saddam had a Stalinist state (and Stalin was one of his heroes), where there was no free press (or web or cellphone access), where daily he had people fed into industrial meat grinders, and where he had dozens of fancy palaces built for himself while siphoning off food-for-oil money into foreign accounts and massive bribes of foreign leaders. Only a Stalinist could be nostalgic for Saddam's brutal regime. There are many objective reporters who have covered Iraq who give quite different conclusions from this opinion piece. The author should have studied them.