I'll take alot of punches for the US, we do some silly shit...but we are also peacekeepers, it's something were pretty good at, when we actually set about to do it.  We can blame the state of the region on the fall of a strongman and somehow shift a portion of our culpability, or we can accept that it was our failure to take that strongmans place, as we knew we would have to do going into it.  A ludicrous failure, especially for the US..we're kind of global strongmen ourselves..Saddam was bush league in comparison.

As I've mentioned before, I think that expressing the narrative in this way subtley shifts the point of focus, and thus the point of culpability. It allows us to point at something other than ourselves, to account for our failure..at least in part.

I'd say yes the world was better with Saddam than without him. On the other half of that our president and his staff at the
time had gotten a warning that something would happen and he did nothing about it. He effectively let 9/11 happen on top of that
we go to war in the wrong region and started a false campaign of we will find weapons of mass destruction. Again get this
they didn't have the means to make wmd's. Bush for what it's worth committed war crimes and well hasn't even charged for any
of them.

The people of the middle east region do not need democracy they need a tight fisted take no shit ruler.
Saddam had power he made people scared he would kill people if they looked at him the wrong way.
But a country like this needs that type of dictator to keep people in control because well after he died
look at how many different terrorist groups popped up after that. Hell we even trained one of them
now they want to kill us.

The people he'd gassed or tortured would disagree.  

Look at you, talking about how "a country like this" - I can only assume you are referring to the people..."needs" a dictator like Saddam. That's some rough news....lol. They needed to be gassed, they needed to be tortured. Holy shit...what did they do to deserve that? Must be real fuckers, those people.

(December 31, 2015 at 9:51 am)dyresand Wrote: The people of the middle east region do not need democracy they need a tight fisted take no shit ruler.

No, they don't need a strong fist. What they need is a revision of the arbitrary colonial borders from the 20ies and 30ies. That led to caging in different ehtnicities, believes and tribes, who haven't got any love for each other. They never wanted to form a society in the first place. Strong fist was only the one keeping the lid on the boiling kettle by establishing a Sunni minority rule over the Shia majority. It says nothing about the people not being ready to elect their own governments.

It's very simplistic to talk about the people of the Middle East, since they're as diverse as anywhere else.

(December 31, 2015 at 10:23 am)abaris Wrote:

(December 31, 2015 at 9:51 am)dyresand Wrote: The people of the middle east region do not need democracy they need a tight fisted take no shit ruler.

No, they don't need a strong fist. What they need is a revision of the arbitrary colonial borders from the 20ies and 30ies. That led to caging in different ehtnicities, believes and tribes, who haven't got any love for each other. They never wanted to form a society in the first place. Strong fist was only the one keeping the lid on the boiling kettle by establishing a Sunni minority rule over the Shia majority. It says nothing about the people not being ready to elect their own governments.

It's very simplistic to talk about the people of the Middle East, since they're as diverse as anywhere else.

So we need to start cutting up land in areas to make people happy if that was case why haven't we done that already...

(December 31, 2015 at 10:53 am)dyresand Wrote: So we need to start cutting up land in areas to make people happy if that was case why haven't we done that already...

No, we simply have to allow them to do it themselves. Not keeping so called countries from falling apart at all costs.

(December 31, 2015 at 10:58 am)abaris Wrote:

(December 31, 2015 at 10:53 am)dyresand Wrote: So we need to start cutting up land in areas to make people happy if that was case why haven't we done that already...

No, we simply have to allow them to do it themselves. Not keeping so called countries from falling apart at all costs.

Hmm... actually that would work we just have to have the right diplomacy going over there to do it though.

(December 31, 2015 at 7:16 am)abaris Wrote:

(December 30, 2015 at 10:47 pm)TrueChristian Wrote: Just to be clear, I am agnostic about the merits of invading Iraq.

If Saddam ultimately would have been content to be a horrible dictator who only oppressed his own people, I would say our invasion was 100% a mistake.

I don't know how old you are and therefore can't say if you recall the situation in the 90ies and early 2000s. Iraq was virtually under siege, with strict embargos in place that made it even impossible to get certain medications. A situation killing off quite a number of children by proxy, which made headlines around '95. A situation leading Albright to say, she didn't care if they died, as can be seen in the vid, Capn posted.

And, oh yes, bombed on a regular basis by the US and by the UK. On every given pretext and at one time even called the Monica bombings, because Clinton was in a tight spot for a BJ and needed some distraction to present to the public.

Saddam virtually couldn't move. His army was in tatters and he had no airforce. So this argument of Saddam preparing to strike again is nothing short of absurd. Not to speak of the UN commissions constantly being in and out of the country.



Im 25. I remember when I was younger hearing that Saddam was a "Bad guy" but never knew the extent to how bad he was. I remember being sort of nervous about invading Iraq but I thought maybe there were WMDs there.

I remember though that before we invaded many of the anti-war people used the threat of his WMDs as an argument not to invade saying that all our troops might be massacred.

Why wouldn't Saddam just come clean, tell the UN he was sorry and do whatever he could to get the sanctions lifted? I suppose he was sort of an egomaniac who may have had a grandiose napolean complex of some sort?

It's kind of hypocritical me being an American, but I think it's troubling that Saddam was so fixated on biological weapons for so long.

Why were there such punishing sanctions on Iraq? To stop it from making non-existant WMDS? And wasn't part of the reason why the Iraqi people suffered so because Saddam was more concerned with building palaces for himself than helping his own people?

The WMD tale is exclusively American - to make their own population toe the line. It's based on a single false source. An impostor named Curveball by the services, who previously had been kicked out by the German BND, who issued explicit warnings when he showed up in America.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curveball_%28informant%29

They went with that narrative because it was already within the cultural consciousness.  He -had- used WMD before, which makes it easier to stick an allegation, even if it isn't true. They shopped their warehouse for a story that would fit, essentially.