Free the population?! You mean remove the things that protected the majority of the population such as the state itself, the military and security forces, smash huge amounts of their infrastructure, kill loads of people, likely in the hundreds of thousands or higher and all of this results in the strengthening of Al Qaeda like groups who were the exact enemy the war on terror was supposed to be fighting against! Saddam would have been able to fight them off but we removed him, Assad seems to be holding his own but western leaders wanted to remove him to. Similar groups exist in Libya thanks to us, Gaddafi would have been able to destroy such groups had we not attacked and removed him. Western foreign policy seems to lurch from one disaster to another.
The war on terror has been a total failure actually helping and spreading the groups it was supposed to destroy!