Including all the worst post-invasion times in Iraq, primarily the first five years after the fall of Saddam’s Baathist regime, the average death rate due to violent causes has been on the order of roughly one person in two thousand per year.

The rate has fallen dramatically in recent times. While there are still frequent suicide and other bombings and assassinations, the level is far below the peak that we’ve seen. And regardless of the motivations behind our invasion of that country, there are clear reasons to believe that the country is in better shape now than where it was before. Perhaps as many as a hundred thousand or a few more have lost their lives to violence in the past seven years, but Saddam Hussein himself on multiple occasions took a large chunk of as many lives away simply to show who was the boss.

And argue all you want about the “abomination” of our involvement in that war, with or without U.S. presence al-Qaeda in Iraq would have killed indiscriminately, possibly resulting in the most abominable pseudo-theocracy on the planet. Even if for all the wrong reasons, a lot of right has been accomplished, at much more than an inconsiderable cost, but tiny in comparison with so many conflicts in times past.

We owe no apologies for what was done in general, although perhaps some are owed due to specific instances of wrongdoing within that time span. And as of this moment, Iraq is surviving as an independent representative democracy even in not exactly flourishing. But our own struggles in the early years were hardly without widespread suffering and death on a comparable level to what Iraq has seen, even higher yet.

Let’s wait a few years before assigning abject blame for atrocious criminal behavior regarding this action. The Iraqi people in general don’t hate us any more or less than they ever did, and many are in much better shape now as a result of our “meddling” in their affairs.