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Using Mills Utilitarianism theory, the action that brings the greater happiness to the greater number of people is the most ethical action. I'd say that a greater number of people are better off in Iraq than they were before Saddam left.

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luvdemshrooms said:
Poll shows Baghdad residents optimistic



BAGHDAD, Iraq, Sept. 24 (UPI) -- Nearly two-thirds of Baghdad residents say the removal of Saddam Hussein was worth the hardships they have endured, a report said Wednesday.

Despite the collapse of government and civic institutions, looting and violence and shortages of water and electricity, 67 percent of 1,178 Iraqis told a Gallup survey team within five years, their lives will be better than before the U.S.-led invasion.

Only 8 percent of those queried said they believed their lives would be worse off as a result of the military campaign to remove Saddam and his Baath Party leadership, the New York Times reported.

The survey, which was conducted in late August and early September, cut across the ethnically diverse landscape of the capital.

The results revealed Iraqis in the capital still maintain a great deal of skepticism about the motives of the United States and Britain.

Residents said they hold France and its president, Jacques Chirac, in higher regard than President George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair.


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Is this what they mean by freedom ?" asked Zaidan Khalaf Mohammed on Tuesday after the US 82nd Airborne Division had killed his brother and two other family members in Sichir, central Iraq, in an air and ground assault on their one-storey home. The Americans had come, he said, "like terrorists", while US forces claimed they had only attacked when they came under fire. No evidence was offered and none found.

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These killings are after all merely the latest in a string of bloody "mistakes" by US occupation forces, including the repeated shooting of demonstrators, murderous attacks on carloads of civilians at roadblocks and this month's massacre of members of the US-controlled Iraqi police force. In most countries, any of these incidents would have provoked a national or even an international outcry. But in occupied Iraq, US officials feel under no pressure to offer more than the most desultory explanation for the destruction of expendable Iraqi lives.

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Whatever the formal outcome of the Hutton inquiry and the displacement activity of the government's row with the BBC over an early-morning radio broadcast, it has unquestionably confirmed that Alastair Campbell and other Downing Street officials did strain every nerve to create the false impression of a chemical and biological weapons threat from Iraq, a threat that it is increasingly obvious did not exist.
Combined with the failure to find any weapons, the admission by the former chief UN weapons inspector Hans Blix that he now believes Iraq long ago destroyed them and the discrediting of a litany of propaganda ploys (links with al-Qaida, the forged Niger uranium documents, the 45-minute weapons launch claim), Hutton has helped to strip the last vestige of possible legal cover from the aggression and shift opinion against the war.

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Paul Bremer, the head of the US occupation authority, insists "there is enormous gratitude for what we have done", and the dwindling band of cheerleaders for war have seized on contradictory and questionable Baghdad opinion surveys conducted by western pollsters to back the claim.

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