Surely there must be articles online reporting about this violence. I don't mean some report, but I mean an article like this one from today's news:
Death toll from market car bombing near Baghdad rises to 16
Every time there is some major kind of violence, there are dozens of news reports documenting it. I don't think there has been a day in the last year where I could not find 10 or 20 such articles in the major news media.
So then, if there was all this violence in Iraq in 2002, show me some articles. In fact, show me even a single one reporting on a specific incident. All I see for far are generalizations, and nothing in the form of concrete evidence.
I don't doubt that Saddam was a ruthless dictator who often murdered his opposition, but the numbers of those killed in this fashion at best would be fewer than probably died this week in Iraq in all the chaos there.
And no, Kurd and Shiite civilians and fighters killed during Kurdish uprising of the 1980s or the civil war of the early 1990s does not quality as "murdering your political opposition". If that were the case, then Abraham Lincoln would be considered the most ruthless leader of all having been responsible for a war that killed over 600,000 people.
Yes, targeted assasinations did indeed happen, and major political opposition leaders were indeed murdered, but not anywhere near the numbers that have been killed in the current war, or even probably in the last month. And in this sense, Iraq was not any different than half of the countries on the planet. Have you ever taken a look at how many political leaders in the United States have been assasinated over the years? Oh yeah...I'm sorry....American politicians are always conveniently murdered by lone nuts. LOL
If you want to make a case that Iraq had lots of chaos and violence in the 1980s and early 1990s, then you can make a very good case. But Iraq in 2002 was a relatively peaceful nation. Los Angeles probably had more violcence in 2002 than Iraq did.