Ok,
Time to shake things up a little. Is it possible that as bad as Sadaam was, he was ruling in the only way a place like Iraq can be ruled? Perhaps his way of keeping peace was the only way to keep that country under control. My father was born in Yugoslavia right before World War II. When the communists left and the country started into civil war, I asked him about it. His answer was that the ethnic groups there hated each other when he was a kid and had done so for hundreds of years. The only thing that kept them in check was that they hated and feared the Germans and then the Soviets more than each other. Take away the Controling dictarship, and the country immediately falls into civil war as the competing sides try to take dominion over each other. Given its natural cycyle, (that is taking away the UN, the United States, or other outside powers) eventually these countries will split or one side will take power and kill or drive the other side to submission.
The reason they say Sadaam conducted the mass killing in question is that someone had made an attempt on his life. His approach was to kill enough people that no one would ever try it again. Absent that action, it is probable he either would have been killed or an uprising agianst him would have taken place, resulting in even more people being killed.
I won't even try to say that Sadaam wasn't a tyrant or a sicko, just that if he hadn't arisen, someone else would have. The conditions present required a person like him to exist. If we fail to realize that and expect the people there to suddenly act and behave like us, we are fools. Either we stay, we partition the country, or we let the country slip back in to a country that is not much different then it was before, only with different actors on the scene.
I kind of think of what Sadaam did in mass killings is not much different than if we were to take the position that if a terrorist attacks us, we will destroy his home base, including his family, relatives and surrounding neighbors. Not a popular position, but maybe the necessary one.