Is world better without Saddam?

[The Grand Nudger]

What you fail to notice is, one error led to the other. There was one Iraqi crook, I can't remembber his name, at that time, the US were largely relying on. He was exposed, after the fact. But the damage was already done. Just the same as with the one and only WMD source, who first tried his luck with the German BND, and being found unreliablle by the Germans, offered himself up to the CIA.

Pretext to war.  Again, you and I don't have a disagreement here, it's not something either of us failed to notice.  Failure stacked atop failure.  There were already dissenting voices, even at this stage.  There were already predictions.  Rightly so.

It isn't a miracle that the predictions were right. I was watching European as well as American news coverage at that time. The Europeans foretold that there will ensue a conflict between Sunnis, not wanting to take the backseat, and the Shia majority. The American coverage did no such thing.

OFC is wasn't a miracle, neither of us believes that.  American coverage was bought and paid for.  

It's common sense, actually. And the most obvious part of it is Brehmer disbanding the Iraqui army. Probably not under his own steam, but he was the one issuing the order. So, claiming to know what you were in for, comes over as a little bit naive. It started with the little nuisances, such as securing the oil ministery, but failing to secure the museums, where countless irreplaceable artifacts were instantly looted. Probably to end up in soome private collection. And it ended with a slap to the face of countless people, suddenly losing their livelihood.

You assume that this means that we did not know what we were in for, when it very clearly shows that we we did know what we were in for.  They secured their oil interests.  You are dealing with a group of people who presented a narrative unrelated to their actual plans.  Who used manufactured evidence to pursue them.  That doesn't mean that we didn't have a plan to secure the interests of the Iraqi people, it simply means that securing the oil was higher on a list of priorities than securing a museum.  Again, we employ an army of people to generate plans for both, we sometimes select one, and not the other.  I think that both you and I would point to this as an example of american incompetence, wouldn't we?  

That's only scratching the surface, but it points to the fact of having no plan beyond toppling Saddam.

Toppling Saddam was the plan, just like Iraq had WMDs.  This, to my mind, was pretext as well. Is that not the entirety of what I'm expressing? That removing Saddam really would have been a good thing, and that we should have gone in for that reason, that we should have employed plans that would facilitate that - and it's attendent issues, rather than a plan chiefly engaged in securing oil wells and private contracts?