In Case You Doubted, Mark Steyn, replying to a reader's letter ('I'm sure that you are right, but can you back that up with some statistics...'), tallies up some reasons for proclaiming the Iraq invasion a great humanitarian success:

'On the matter of deaths during Saddam's rule, Tony Blair said before the war that the total figure was 400,000. Since then the Documental Centre for Human Rights in Iraq has compiled documentation on over 600,000 civilian executions. This sounds high, but Human Rights Watch reports that Saddam's men killed 100,000 Kurds just in the Anfal operation (not included among that figure of 600,000). For the sake of argument, let's exclude the 500,000 Iraqi civilians who died during the pointless war with Iran. Averaged out over the 24 years of Saddam's formal reign (he was a member of the ruling Baath elite for much longer), that works out at 80 civilian deaths per day, and broadly conforms to the anecdotal evidence I heard on my own travels in Iraq, where very many families had lost so many uncles and brothers and sons that demographically they skewed heavily female. Assuming that Saddam would have continued killing at roughly his average rate, that means that as of now, a year after his removal, 29,200 people are alive who wouldn't otherwise have been. Even factoring in the civilian deaths of the last year, that's a huge net gain.'