U2Edge
Gold Member
- Sep 15, 2012
- 5,275
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But once again, I'll articulate my point:
1. Saddam was a genocidal maniac. His and the Baath Party's efforts to eradicate the entire Kurdish population goes back to the 1970s.
2. Saddam was bribing France and Russia to get the sanctions lifted. This corrupted the process of the UN Security Council.
3. Saddam was a State Sponsor of Terror. He harbored Abu Nidal, rewarded the families of Palestinian suicide bombers, and allowed Zarqawi to set up a base in Northern Iraq.
4. Saddam broke the cease-fire with the US many times and the perception of the US as a "paper tiger" was undermining the purpose of any cease-fire agreement.
5. Saddam was either going to be Al Qaeda's most ardent supporter or he was going to be ousted and the resources at his disposal were going to be in control of someone worse.
The traditional American approach has been to depose the "out of control bastard" and install another bastard who understand that we hold the whip.
The effort to turn Iraq into the Shining Democracy on the Hill was so damn asinine that it looks like a policy devised by drugged out peaceniks congregated together at a dorm room bull session.
What's so hard to understand about the fact that identification of a problem is DIFFERENT than a solution to the problem. All you're doing is identifying the problem and resting on your laurels. EVERYONE understood that Saddam was a problem, so don't go patting yourself on the back for being able to see that he was a problem.
The hard part here is to devise the best solution to that problem. Invading and then nation-building in order to create a western-modeled outpost in the Middle East was sheer lunacy.
Iraq was invaded and removed from power to remove a threat to United States and global interest in protecting and securing the vital natural resources of the region that were often threaten by Saddam's behavior.
In removing Saddam, the United States had no choice by to choose another form of government. It would have been foolish for the United States to invade Iraq and ignore its own democratic principles of government as well as the wishes of the Iraqi people and install a new dictatorship. Doing so would have created a far worse insurgency than the United States faced in the early days of occupation.