(December 26, 2016 at 7:34 pm)It_Was_me Wrote: I think it's bad. I think it's taken way too far these days. I often see some Americans who put their soldiers on a pedestal like they're God's or something like that. Or there's that world revolves around me syndrome where not all, but quite a few Americans believe that the world revolves around them. A friend of mine thinks the solution to ISIS is to just nuke the middle east. Do people not understand that there's a small fraction of people in that part of the world that are evil terrorists? Also, I get so sick and tired of hearing people say that we shouldn't have taken out Saddam H. in Iraq. People I don't understand quite how evil that man was; the problem was we didn't have any proper strategy afterwords to maintain peace. I just think many Americans have become ignorant and have the me me me attitude towards the world. FYI: I don't agree with the Iraq war either, but Saddam was a very bad man and did terrible things to his people. It's our fault for not using a proper strategy to put someone in power, democratically who will maintain the peace.
[Emphasis added -- Thump]
While I agree that nationalism is generally a negative trait, I'm one of those people who think it was a huge blunder to take Hussein out of power. Iraq is a synthetic nation, pieced together from several of the remnants of the Ottoman Empire after WWI by the victorious Allies.
As such, there was (and is) a natural instability to the nation, which doesn't take well to democracy. The triune sharing of power requires a willingness to work together, but with two of the factions (Sunni and Shia'a) being based on opposing religious doctrines, the ability to fashion a coalition government is quite limited. Thus, in terms of stability, an autocracy is going to be more successful in governance.
While Hussein was a monster, the fact is that Iraq was a functioning society during his regime. In addition to that, as a functioning nation, Iraq served our own national interests by providing a bulwark against Iranian expansionism. Once Hussein was overthrown, the Iranians were able to not only insert themselves into Iraqi politics and internecine warfare (to our detriment, as our casualty rolls show), they were also able to intervene in the Syrian civil war, prolonging it. Without Iraq growling at them, they were also able to assist the rebels in Yemen, producing another bloodbath as they fight a proxy war with Saudi Arabia.
Of course Hussein was an awful man and of course the Iraqis suffered much under his rule. But I think a strong case can be made that not only are they suffering more because he's no longer in power, other peoples are as well. I'm not sure that in a country fractured by factionalism as Iraq was (and is) that democracy can easily take root; and I'm certain that the neocons who pushed for the 2003 invasion grossly underestimated the difficulty of such a task.
