How different do you think the situation in Iraq would be today if...?

Our support of those groups you mentioned would have been a death sentence for them. Hussein was extremely insecure about his authority. Any perceived threat to his authority was met with brutality, torture, and murder. There could not be a popular uprising because he had intimidated the populace to such a degree that family members would turn each other in to the secret police for subversive comments. These 'rebels' weren't merely executed. Their wives and daughters were raped, tortured and murdered in front of them, they were tortured in unimaginably horrible and depraved ways (I saw the videos of it in our intel briefs at the time) and were eventually executed as traitors. This made any sort of popular uprising virtually impossible. Bill Clinton's plan was essentially a pipe dream. It was yet another example of our government projecting our values onto someone else and expecting them to value the same things we do. We place value on negotiation and peaceful resolutions. Hussein and his bunch viewed such things as a weakness to be exploited.