As a Shiite living in Saddam Hussein's Iraq, Thanaa al-Taee eked out an existence in a totalitarian state that oppressed her religious sect, cracked down on ethnic minorities, and silenced dissent by torturing and executing opponents who dared criticize the despotic regime.
Now, watching sectarian bloodshed rip apart her country, al-Taee wonders if the war that toppled Hussein's dictatorship was worth it.
"I have a conflict with myself about what happened to us, Iraqis," al-Taee, 38, who had worked at a Baghdad art gallery before fleeing to Bahrain in 2004, wrote in a recent e-mail after visiting her parents in Baghdad. "Do you think this is better for us?"
It is also the question on the minds of scholars and military experts in the United States, including the architect of the "shock and awe" campaign that helped bring down Hussein's regime. Four years after the United States invaded Iraq, these observers contemplate what Iraq would have looked like today had the Bush administration decided not to go to war.
"How else can you evaluate whether going to war was the sensible thing to do?" said Larry Diamond, who worked as the senior adviser to the Coalition provisional authority in Baghdad in 2004.
Not surprisingly, the experts' answers reflect a range of opinions. Some of those who favored the war feel that the invasion of Iraq, however bloody its consequences, has staved off a larger conflict by putting a major U.S. fighting force in the heart of the Middle East and preventing Hussein from developing weapons of mass destruction.
But others -- including analysts who opposed the war from the start and even some former supporters of the invasion -- paint a different picture.
Without the war, they also see Hussein still in power, but too weakened by international sanctions to have resumed building weapons of mass destruction. Iraq, these experts say, would have been drained by political crackdowns and corruption, but not racked by incessant violence. The United States, whose political and military capital would not have been sapped by the war, would have been in a better position to mediate a workable Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement, rebuild Afghanistan, and possibly even capture Osama bin Laden. The turbulent Middle East would have been far more stable than it is today.
"Wherever you look, this attack on Iraq has the most potentially catastrophic strategic consequences," said Harlan Ullman, the military strategist who masterminded the "shock and awe" campaign of targeted aerial bombardment and missile strikes, which helped U.S. troops quickly incapacitate Hussein's military machine.
"Saddam is gone," Ullman said. "I don't, quite frankly, see any other benefits."
Since the March 19, 2003, invasion, tens or even hundreds of thousands Iraqis have been killed, by some estimates, in bombings, firefights and sectarian execution-style murders. Two million people have fled the country of about 22 million, according to a recent United Nations report, and the U.N. migration agency expects a million more to flee this year. Infrastructure in most of the country is in a shambles, oil production is lower than before the war, and electricity is sporadic. The streets of Baghdad, once flanked with palm trees and neatly pruned hedges, are laden with frequent roadside bombs, rutted by explosions and steeped in stagnant raw sewage.
Had Hussein remained in power, "a very horrible dictatorship would be continuing to reign in that country," said Diamond, now an expert on democracy-building at the Hoover Institution. "Of course, there are people that are better off in Iraq now than they were before. The Shiites, collectively, have an opportunity for power, for resources, for dignity as a group that they didn't have before.
"They also have something of an equal chance to participate in the misery of a destroyed national order. A somewhat leveled opportunity to be kidnapped, to be forced into exile, to have their daughter abducted or raped, to have their father murdered, families killed in the suicide bombings."
Supporters of the war say killings of civilians in Iraq today may not surpass the number of lives that would have been taken by Hussein's Baath Party regime, which had executed tens of thousands Iraqis since 1968.
Had Hussein remained in power, "you would have seen another set of purges on a scale that would have made what's going on now look tame," said Frederick Kagan, a neoconservative expert at the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research.
"There's disorder now but there's freedom," agreed Max Singer, a co-founder of the Hudson Institute, a conservative Washington think-tank. "The Iraqis have not yet given up on making a country for themselves."
By now, say Singer and Kagan, Hussein would have been revving up his once-dormant nuclear arms program, starting a region-wide race that would have posed a far greater threat to the United States than the dangers its troops currently face in Iraq. These analysts see the U.S. invasion as an effective deterrent for nations in the region -- other than Iran -- that may have harbored their own nuclear ambitions.
"There's a good chance that Libya," which abandoned its nuclear path in 2003, "would have continued its program to get nuclear weapons," said Singer.
"We were headed to a point where ... Saddam rearms, starts to become a major regional threat," Kagan said.
The prospect of a nuclear-armed Iraq would have encouraged Iran, Iraq's arch-enemy, to pursue its own nuclear arms program at an even greater speed than it is doing now, he said, paving the way for an "apocalyptic scenario" of an Iran-Iraq nuclear race.
"It would have ended up posing a more significant threat than what we have now," said Kagan, who advocates deploying an additional 30,000 troops for 18 months to quash the violence in Iraq. "What would have been required for success in the other scenario would have been much greater than the sacrifices we are called to make now."
But other experts say Hussein's nuclear program in 2003 was in such disarray that it would have taken Iraq many years before it could pose any significant threat.
By now, "we would have been incrementally losing more control over Saddam's actions, but ... he would have posed no direct threat to the United States," said Wayne White, who, as a former senior Middle East analyst for the State Department, saw intelligence on Iraq before the war. "The Iraqi threat would have been way down the road had we not gone in."
Instead, argue White, Ullman and other experts, the war in Iraq has exacerbated the terrorist threat to the United States. It has turned Iraq into a recruiting tool for international jihadists, making the country a training facility for fighters from around the world. Fighters who have honed their fighting skills in the deserts and shrapnel-scarred city streets of Iraq now export their knowledge to other battlefronts of the war against terror such as Afghanistan, experts on terrorism say.
Without the war, "Iraq would not have been such a training ground for people to be able to get a direct shot at American troops," White said.
Most analysts agree that international jihad would have existed regardless of the war in Iraq, fueled by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the U.S. support of Israel. But had Washington not spent so many resources on the war, it would have been better equipped to fund and "substantially increase the U.S. border screening, defenses, the numbers of people working on these defenses, in addition to the immigration and naturalization services," White said.
"There's a lot of expensive technology" to enhance border security "that hasn't been emplaced because of the lack of funding," White said.
Had it not gone to war with Iraq, Washington also could have spent more effort trying to revive the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, said Ullman, who called that conflict "the real issue." Washington could have rallied support from its allies in the Arab world to help resume Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. This is much harder to achieve today, when the Arab governments are "besieged by constituents outraged at the United States for its perceived anti-Muslim agenda," White said.
The damage to the U.S. image extends beyond the Arab nations. In January, half of the 26,000 people polled for the BBC World Service across 25 countries said the United States is playing a mainly negative role in the world.
"The United States in many quarters is considered a much worse threat to the world security than, say, Iran," White said. "That just shows the depth of the United States' loss of credibility and the fear of the United States taking unilateral action."
Without the enormous strain of the Iraq war depleting the U.S. military, Washington would have been much more capable of building security and statehood in Afghanistan, Diamond said.
"There would not be any resurgence of the Taliban," he said. "There would be much more security on the roads and in the countryside. We might have been able to put in enough troops to actually fully destroy al Qaeda and prevent its evacuation to Pakistan, and might have even found Osama bin Laden."
And Iran would have been further away from dominating the region, because it would have been deterred by Iraq, said Rashid Khalidi, director of the Middle East Institute of Columbia University.
"By destroying what had formerly been the most powerful Arab country ... we have thrust at Iran an even greater power than it (would have) otherwise had," he said.
The rise of Iran -- a Persian Shiite power in the predominantly Arab Sunni Middle East -- enhanced a centuries-old sectarian rift that is threatening to destabilize the region, Khalidi said. Many Sunni states have Shiite minorities within their own countries, and their Sunni leaders see as a threat what Jordan's King Abdullah has called a "Shiite crescent" stretching from Tehran to Beirut.
"We started a particularly poisonous sectarian spiral downwards in the Middle East," Khalidi said.
The Bush administration's push to promote democracy across the Middle East? This, too, would have worked much better had the region not been radicalized by "the Sunni resistance to the occupation by the United States of yet another Arab land," said Diamond. Instead, anti-Western forces gained more power in Lebanon, Egypt and the Palestinian territories.
So, was it worth it?
"There were no human rights, Saddam was a son of a bitch and life was terrible," Ullman said.
But even with Hussein in power, he said, "we'd be a lot better off, and the world in general ... At the moment, you'd be hard-pressed to say Iraqis are better off."
