Is passing the town square test your standard for qualifying for the term 'liberation'?

One problem with that is that very few countries pass the town square test completely. For instance, in Britain after World War 2, blasphemy was still a criminal offence. So according to the town-square standard of liberation, forcibly overthrowing Nazi rule in the Channel Islands was not a liberation because the new regime failed the town square test in regard to criticism of certain religious dogmas. That has the same logic as your claim that the overthrow of Saddam was not a liberation because the new regime fails the town square test in regard to (for instance) Israeli flags. In both cases (post-liberation Channel Islands and post-liberation Iraq) the region in question passes the town square test incomparably better than it did before.

We think that such transistions are indeed liberations under the prevailing usage of the term 'liberation'. But much more important than terminology is the substantive issue of whether human rights organisations ought to have been endorsing the overthrow of the Saddam regime (as we advocate) or working to keep it in place (as they did in the event).