Saddam was a dear friend of America who disappointed his patrons in the 80s by failing to destroy the Iranian revolution! Naughty! Naughty!

From that point on his fortunes began to descend. He began to be seen as a liability rather than an asset. So America began planning to remove him.

They neatly suckered him into invading Kuwait by having their ambassador tell him quite unequivocally that the USA was in no way concerned about him doing such a thing as attacking Kuwait.

Nice move, America. ;-) He fell for it and invaded Kuwait, thus giving the USA the excuse they needed to move against him, and they've been persecuting and destroying Iraq ever since.

The final sin Saddam committed (in America's eyes) was that he decided to sell Iraqi oil for Euros rather than for dollars! That was utterly unacceptable to the USA, so they invented a completely bogus tale about WMDs as an excuse to take Saddam out and occupy Iraq. Saddam had no more chance of surviving than a fish in a barrel after that.

Iraq is immeasurably worse off due to all of the above than it would have been if America had never gotten into a quarrel with Saddam at all. They were once known as the most modern and progressive Arab nation in the Middle East, the nation where women were not afraid to dress in western style clothes on the street and to hold jobs that men hold. They are now a ruined country that has subsided into chaos, poverty, fundamentalism, and despair.

Saddam was just another corrupt dictator, like many that the USA has worked with happily in both the past and the present. He was not unusual in that respect. But the damage he did to Iraq can't even begin to compare to the incredible damage the USA and their allies have done to Iraq, and they did not do it to help Iraqis or to protect anyone except a bunch of big multinational coroporations...and the American dollar.