Donald Trump Praises Saddam Hussein

[Mr. Morden]

Saddam was pretty much the only thing holding Iraq together...

I'm not sure he was holding much of anything together.  The status quo in Iraq was unsustainable, and presumably would have broken one way or another within ten years, even without a US invasion.  Though that's not to say that Saddam wouldn't still be holding onto a lot of territory today.  But you could have had a Syria-like civil war, with Saddam as leader of a rump Sunni state, battling against the Shiite and Kurdish regions, or something like that.

[Mr. Morden]

The whole Shia/Shiite Muslim civil war thing in Iraq didn't come to pass during Saddam Hussein's reign because he was such an utter dirtbag that he was murdering his own people at the first hint of insurrection.  To that extent, ISIS or really any dissent could not grow under in a Saddam Hussein Iraq.

You do realize that Assad was murdering his own people when the protests started in Syria, and that didn't stop a civil war from breaking out?  Also, Saddam didn't even have control of the entirety of Iraq prior to the invasion.