So that I don’t repeat myself, see this reply: https://lemmy.world/comment/9699031

Homosexuality was legal in Iraq while Saddam was in power.

Edit: re your edit-

You realize that by reducing all political activity in Iraq to the invasion of Iraq, you are posing the Iraqi people as puppets with no will of their own?

No, but I am saying their will isn’t being represented. Because it isn’t.

https://www.chathamhouse.org/2021/10/iraqi-elections-still-do-not-deliver-democracy

Queers? I don’t know. Women? Because I do know.

Until the 1990s, Iraqi women played an active role in the political and economic development of Iraq.[121] In 1969, the Ba’ath Party established the General Federation of Iraqi Women, which offered many social programs to women, implementing legal reforms advancing women’s status under the law and lobbying for changes to the personal status code.[121] In 1986, Iraq became one of the first countries to ratify the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women.[121]

During the 1970s and 1980s, Saddam Hussein urged women to fill men’s places in schools, universities, hospitals, factories, the army, and the police. However, women’s employment subsequently decreased as they were encouraged to make way for returning soldiers in the late 1980s and the 1990s.[122] In general in cases of war, as Nadje Sadig Al-Ali, author of Iraqi Women: Untold Stories from 1948 to the Present, argues, "women carried the conflicting double burden of being the main motors of the state bureaucracy and the public sector, the main breadwinners and heads of households but also the mothers of ‘future soldiers.’[123]: 168  In the years following the 1991 Gulf War, many of the positive steps that had been taken to advance women’s and girls’ status in Iraqi society were reversed due to a combination of legal, economic, and political factors.[121] As the economy constricted due to sanctions, women were pushed into more traditional roles.[121] Moreover, Saddam Hussein, in an attempt to maintain legitimacy with conservative Islamic fundamentalists, brought in anti-woman legislation, such as the 1990 presidential decree granting immunity to men who had committed honour crimes.[123]: 202  However, despite Saddam’s appeals to the anti-women elements of Iraqi society, according to local NGOs, they concluded that “women were treated better during the Saddam Hussein era and their rights were more respected than they are now.”[124]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_Iraq

The Criminal Code of 1969, enacted by the Ba’athist party, only criminalized sexual behavior in cases of adultery, incest, rape, prostitution, public acts, or cases involving fraud or someone unable to give consent due to age or mental defect. Homosexuality per se was not a crime, but could be justification for government discrimination and harassment under laws designed to protect national security and public morality.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_rights_in_Iraq

So I don’t know for sure if queer people’s lives would have been better, but at least they wouldn’t have been automatic criminals.

See above: re Satayana.

And yet, homosexuality was legal then and it’s illegal now. Seems like a big difference to me.

Iraq was a secular country with the best healthcare in the region. The US war made electricity and water no longer available 24/7 and allowed a wave of fundamentalism in. Pretending it was broken before the war is ignorance.