Your premise seems strange here. You invoke the "chaos math" idea of sensitive dependence on initial conditions (rather oddly, IMO) as a way to demonstrate the intricate complexity of a particular decision on the world at large. However, you then ask the rest of us to do what super-computers cannot, namely, to predict the compounding effects of a particular decision on the world at large.

I'm not saying that we couldn't come up with some good working theories as to what a world with Saddam still in power might be like. What I am saying is that your allusion to the mathematics seems counter-productive to your point. Sensitive dependence on initial conditions speaks directly to our inability to make reliable predictions in timely fashion with current processing capabilities. So, I just find it a bit odd that you would talk about how hard these predictions would be to make (and wildly inaccurate) by citing that particular idea, and then ask for predictions.

Now, moving away from the math, you're going to have to give other posters some heuristics to ask whether or not Saddam should have been removed. For instance, does/will his removal eventually result in more death than the other path? More instability in the region? More years of war?

What criteria should we use to evaluate your question?

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"Government big enough to supply everything you need is big enough to take everything you have... The course of history shows that as a government grows, liberty decreases."

-Thomas Jefferson