Originally posted by Bry
That's a fair question. I think that Clinton's handling of Iraq was none too good either. From a moral standpoint, the twelve years of embargo probably took a far greater toll on the people of Iraq than the year since the invasion started. Pressure should have been applied earlier and more consistently. That being said, Bush went from almost no pressure to a full scale invasion in a matter of months. I think that the serious threat of invasion, sponsored by the UN, would have forced Saddam to give the inspectors all the freedom of action they could have possibly wanted. The UN could have saved face, the US could have saved trillions, and the objective of bringing Saddam into compliance could have been accomplished, and if it wasn't, the UN could then have been more effectively persuaded to support an invasion, and of course to shoulder more of the economic burden.
<Unfortuately the UN was not willing to provide this pressure.>
I've seen it bandied about on this message board, but I've never heard the administration talk about Saddam's payments to the families of suicide bombers. I'd be interested in seeing a report on one of those families that presumably benefited from Saddam's money. In any case, Palestenians have enough reasons without Saddam's blood money.
Have you ever read Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth? It's a brilliant account of the psychology of the resistances. Suicide Bombers do not shock me, nor does the torture employed by Israel, and I don't think their blood feud was what we had in mind when we declared a "war on terror." If anything, giving money to the families of suicide bombers is the lesser of two evils when compared to the aid the US metes out to Israel each year. Either way, you're implicated in a very nasty and labyrinthine conflict in which the concepts of good and bad, right and wrong, have little or no meaning. But that discussion is for another forum.