Iraq: Was It Worth It?

That's that then. After 7 years, 5 months and 12 days, the Iraq War is over. Everyone else left a long time ago but today Obama formally marked the end of the combat mission and the American troops are going home.
So did Iraq become the 'dramatic and inspiring example of freedom for other nations in the region' as President George W. Bush envisioned in February, 2003?
It isn't easy to measure just how successful or unsuccessful the Iraq War was but the usual question asked is 'are the people better off now at the end of the war than they were at the beginning of it'?
A civilian death toll ranging from 250,000 to a million, another 2 million internally displaced, oil production below its pre-invasion level, homes enjoying fewer hours of electricity, daily deaths and kidnappings with suicide bombers reaping havoc would appear to say the Iraqis are no better off.
If we measured the war effort in terms of what would have happened if the invasion had not been launched is pure speculation but we can assume Saddam and his sons would still be in power. How much of a threat he was to us in 2003 has been highlighted by the Chilcot inquiry where it has been borne out that the threat posed by Saddam Hussein before the invasion in 2003 was low. The no-fly zones, sanctions and weapons inspections were holding Saddam in his box. He possessed no weapons of mass destruction, had no programmes running to implement chemical, biological or nuclear weapons and his military was a pale shadow of the 1991 force that invaded Kuwait. In all probability if the invasion had not gone ahead, we would be in the same position in 2010 as we were in 2003. A weak and beaten leader with hardly a military capacity to his name.
The war could be measured in how much safer the World is today. Al Queada bombings killed 45 in Riyadh, 25 in Istanbul, 190 in Madrid and 33 in Algiers. British born suicide bombers angry at Britain's role in the Iraq War killed 56 in London. Countless other attacks have been thwarted either by intelligence or sheer luck as in the case of the Glasgow Airport attack when the jeep packed with propane canisters got jammed in the glass doors.
Al Queada has dispersed around the globe and Osama Bin Laden is still at large and taunting the West with sporadic audio messages.
Tony Blair was forced from office by his own party, George W Bush was a global hate figure and America was alienated from its allies.
At a cost to the UK and US of almost a trillion dollars and 4500 military personnel, Iraq did not become a beacon of democracy, nor did it create a domino effect that toppled other regimes in area and the Iraqi people may not be under a tyrants rule, but are worse off in every other respect. The World is not a safer place and the UK's and America's reputation for human rights has taken a beating that will take years to rectify.
It does make you ask, was it all worth it?

Lucy