If the US had not invaded Iraq then a lot of people would still be alive today, and the invasion was on a pretty flimsy pretext.
Personally I saw Saddam as a form of Tito, and we already knew what happened in Yugoslavia - so the current mess was not hard to anticipate.
You’re wrong on so many levels.
Forgive me, but when you say things like
it sure sounds to me like you’re blaming America for all the evils of the world.
I find it hard to take you seriously, hating the US so and claiming that you believe so strongly how wrong and evil it is, yet associate yourself with America and in fact live within it; rings kind of hollow, to me, especially being an American myself while living in another country. It’s not like it’s hard to leave if you want to.
Of course we did, in 1991. The choice was with Saddam - follow the UN’s rules or the sanctions continued. He chose not to follow the rules. By your twisted logic, this is all the fault of the US as well. Of course you forget the entire UN behind that particular action, and supporting those particular sanctions.
What a ridiculous premise. Saddam tortured and killed all those who opposed him; Iraq was not in peace, the Shi’a were ground under the heel of the much more powerful Sunni minority. Now the tables have reversed, and America naively hoped this would change things by allowing the majority to run things. What has acutally happened is tit-for-tat cycles of revenge. I fail to see how this is our fault, or our intention, because clearly we would benefit greatly if none of this was happening. Body counts alone make your statement a lie.
You conveniently forget the attacks on Kurds and Shi’a during Saddams reign, killing hundreds of thousands of people, as well as the war of aggression he started with Iran which killed upwards of 1 million on either side, but I guess you’re right - Saddam was a nice guy and if only he’d stayed in power Iraq would be a land of peace and a beacon of light for the rest of the ME.
Evasion seems to be your favourite word. Did you just learn it? Or are you finding it difficult to factually debate something you clearly feel incredibly emotional about and finding it a bit harder than knee-jerk reaction to anything the US does as ‘evil’.
You associate motive with US actions; you assume we get some form of benefit from the chaos. Which clearly shows your own ignorance of the situation on the ground. The Neo-Cons were wrong, sure, but they never intended or wished for the level of brutality on the ground that we’re seeing now. Yet you seem to assume they’re rubbing their hands together in glee or something like some sort of black and white movie villains. In addition to a highly simplistic world view, it’s simply wrong.
Sure, but I have a hard time accepting responsibility as a nation for 655,000 deaths for two reasons: If Saddam had stayed in power, his butcher’s bill would be well over 1.5 million including deaths from refusing to follow the rules established by the UN through sanctions, and many of the deaths in Iraq would have happened anyways if Saddam stayed in power and continued to violently repress the Shi’a majority.
Yep, and one of the main reasons I was always against the Iraq invasion. I’m not denying Iraq was dumb for us to do, but I am denying that the US and our allies are responsible for 655,000 deaths in Iraq since 2003 alone.
No. We commit more than our fair share, but hardly all of them.
First, you assume that I like any country; I don’t. Second, the idea that you are supposed to abandon job and home and friends and family just because you don’t like the country they and you live in is foolish. Does the phrase “cut off your nose to spite your face” ring a bell ?
I was talking about the invasion, obviously. And nothing Saddam did would have stopped that.
And now women as a group are oppressed, their economy in ruins, and chaos and violence are everywhere. The Iraqis were safer, more prosperous and more free under Saddam; we are that bad.
They rather prove my point.
No, he was a monster; we are worse monsters. Iraq under him was nasty; now, it’s a nightmare.
Of course we, or rather the people who back Bush do. An enemy of Israel is gone, and the chaos in Iraq has raised oil prices; his oil friends are making gobs of money from this. Plus, a great many Muslims are dead, women are oppressed, and gays are being slaughtered; more benefits from the Christian Conservative point of view.
Prove it. At the very least, I see no reason that they ever cared in the slightest about how many deaths they caused.
I’m not so sure about 1.5 million, he was not running death camps.
The other thing is that he was Ba’athist, which is secular, he had Christians, Shi’ites, Kurds the lot with him - although it sounds as though people from his home town of Tikrit were favoured.
In 1991 there was a Shi’ite rebellion in the South and he put it down ruthlessly, my understanding is that the mass graves date back to then.
He was certainly ruthless, but not genocidal. His son Uday was a much nastier piece of work.
The thing that the USA did not quite understand was that he hated Moslem Fundamentalists of any flavour - he was a grandstander who did not understand the West, but I reckon that he postponed more deaths Iraqi than he caused - and mostly the people he killed were not the sort you would want to invite for dinner.
Nice use of logic. Too bad it deserted you when you started reacting from emotion rather than using your brain.
Prove it. We’re the good guys in any metric you care to use to nearly any other nation on earth. We’ve the best system in the world, the most justice, the most freedom. We’re not perfect, but I doubt you’d find a single reasonable person anywhere who would be stupid enough to claim that.
So you hate America but see no reason why it’s hypocritical at best to still claim the benefits of being an American? Makes me think you’re just a parlor pink at best.
You assume I care about what countries you like? Nothing could be further from the truth. Here to help fight ignorace after all, as it says on the banner, and your knee-jerk responses and stance appears to me to be quite ignorant as well as lop-sided and unfair in the extreme.
Nothing you say is obvious except your parrot rote of ‘America bad, everyone else good’ every chance you get.
Can you in fact count?
Saddam’s body count from 1979-2003: At least 1.5 million, probably closer to 2 million. That’s 83,000 per year. Assuming he stayed in power for the last 4 years as well, facing uprisings and the like, you can assume he would have had to keep killing to maintain power, so let’s assume he had to keep killing at the same rate of around 40,000 per year to keep the Kurds and Shi’a in check. That’s another 160,000 people into the meat grinder. By your estimates, that would be all fine and dandy because you’re using pumped-up and illegitimate counts of Iraqi deaths and throwing them at America’s feet.
US body count (according to reputable sources) in 4 years from 2003-2007: 54,000. I’m discounting deaths from other sources that cannot be attributed to US forces, or those deaths that can be directly attributed to the sanction years from 1991. That’s a rate of 13,500 per year.
You don’t have to be a genius to see the flaws in your argument.
Except the women he raped and killed, or those he let his sons rape and kill, or those he starved to death to continue funding his army, sure those women were better off.
Violence was everywhere before - it was just state-funded and organized, but I can see how you think that’s OK.
A monster. At least you can admit this.
So what? Are you saying that if we didn’t have any interest in Iraq that would be better? Care to think about Darfur? The Bushies have no interests there, so we just let it happen.
Very simple - how have the neo-cons benefitted by the current debacle? They’ve lost both houses of Congress, they’ve lost common support amongst even the NASCAR dads, they’ve lost funding, they’ve lost everything. From this metric alone, it proves my point.
1-1.5 million died in the Iran-Iraq war which he started; 150,000 in the AnFal campaign; 30-40,000 in the Kurdish Campaigns, 100-200,000 Marsh Arabs killed or displaced. No, he wasn’t running death camps, but he sure killed and buried a hell of a lot of his enemies in the deserts.
He didn’t just ‘favour’ those from his home town, he only allowed Ba’athists (who were Sunni only, not Kurds, Christians or Shi’a) to vote in elections. Anyone not a Ba’athist was violently repressed if they ever stepped out of line.
Saddam didn’t hate Muslim extremists; he hated Shi’a Muslim Extremists; he simply used Sunni Muslim Extremists.
Arrogant garbage. America is one of the least charitable countries; we look charitable because we are rich, but in proportion to our assets we rank near the bottom. We are infested with racism, with homophobia, with religious craziness, with a huge income gap, and are extremely violent. Many countries do better than us by a wide variety of standards.
If I wanted benefits, I’d move to, say, Canada.
Those are the voices in your head, not me. I’ve never said “everyone else is good”.
The reputable study is the Lancet study that said over 600,000, it used the standard methods used to count deaths in wars and such.
And now instead of some women being bad off, they all are.
Not on the same scale, and not random.
Yes. We destroy what we touch. The world would be better off if America sank into the ocean.
They have bases in Iraq, they’ve crippled Iraqi oil production, made huge profits, weakened American civil rights, twisted Iraqi law in their image, killed lots of people they hate, and are likely to get their war with Iran. They’ve gotten an awful lot of what they want.
Garbage. He was a secular dictator; only in neocon fantasies was he a Muslim extremist of any variety.
Reading GomiBoy’s posts give me a chilly flashback to the 2004 election cycle.
Oh, please. Please. You think your life is normal? YTou think you’re like everyone else on this planet?
You earn an American salary. You drive a cheap American-priced car on an excellent American highway system while paying American gas prices. You pay American taxes, which means that compared to the rest of the world, you hardly pay taxes at all. You have an American level of personal security, which is still pretty damn high. You have the wide-open spaces of America to travel and to build your home. Any commodity, any luxury you desire is at your fingertips.
You have an ocean to your east and an ocean to your west to ward off invaders.
Whether you like it or not, your life is the envy of billions, billions who work much harder than you for much less, most of whom would trade everything they own for the opportunities you have. Opportunities that come from living in a rich, prosperous, safe, stable country.
And if any of that wealth, prosperity, safety and stability comes at the expense of people in other countries, then you’re as much as a benificiary as anyone. You’re an accomplice, whether you want it or not.
His Foreign Minister was Christian
The thing the USA does not understand is that Ba’athists are our natural allies
Ba’athists are Pan Arab - but they don’t give a toss about religion.
Saddam knew his patch
We can be vindictive.
Thank your for that perspective. I wish you and your family well in a troubled area of the world.
More applause from Tel Aviv West, Alessan. 
Anyway, about Iran–well, we have all sorts of roiling disputes and power plays in our own well-scrutinzed, “open”, democratic, multi-house government, and the end result is that even the players inside it often have no clue whose bright idea this thing or that thing was. How much worse must it be within the byzantine Persian hall of mirrors that is Iran?
So I don’t know if xtisme’s question is answerable. Who is “Iran” exactly?
It’s rather the other way around. Islamic fundamentalism was pretty much unheard of in Chechnya before the two wars the Russians started there after the fall of the Soviet Union.
I’ll agree that Nationalism and Moslem Fundamentalism are a bit tangled up in Chechenya - come to think of it, they are in other places. A bit like Communism and Nationalism in say Vietnam.
However I would not say that the Russians started the wars in Chechenya, as they withdrew they decided that the place made a sensible border.
My WAG made in 1979, was that the Russians understood what was round the corner when they had problems in Afghanistan and after a useless decade, decided to cut their losses and retreat.
@GomiBoy Saddam caused the Iran/Iraq war and was pretty unpleasant to the Kurds but by 2003 the Kurds had been totally safe and Iran was not at war with anyone.
I’m pretty sure that anyone could be a Ba’athist, but being openly anti-Ba’athist was not a sensible idea - if we had not invaded in 2003 then I doubt that the body count 2003-7 would have been that high - unless he had got wind of a rebellion which he was always looking for.
I would put him on the level of SAVAK in Iran, to the West it looks atrocious, but the people he was persecuting turned out to be worse.
Cite? And aren’t you conflating America the country with America the people?
Is it a personal insult if I say please do that?
No, but you do say everyone in America is bad. I’d like to see how America is worse than say communist China or Russia under Putin?
Which has dubious backing at best. It counts deaths from any cause since the invasion, some of which are clearly not caused by the invasion itself, and further counts lots and lots of deaths from causes that have nothing to do with allied actions in the country. Every time a family feuds with another and someone dies, that’s added to the death toll and chalked up to America’s butchers bill by knee-jerk liberals who claim America is the incarnation of evil.
So just having the women bad off was just peachy keen in your book then? And how does that include the hundreds of thousands of Shi’a and Marsh Arabs killed and displaced by Saddam?
So random violence of a smaller scale is totally acceptable to you? How your metrics change. Clearly if the US had done nothing, and Saddam and his sons had continued to rape and pillage their own country, you’d have nothing to say, right? How about Darfur then?
You first, please. Oh, and you’re wrong. Ever hear of a little gem called the Marshall Plan? How about lend-lease? How about Tsunami relief efforts by the US Navy?
Cite?
Oh, is that why he paid the families of Palestinian sucide bombers money every time they blew up an Israli pizza joint, only allowed Sunni Muslims to vote or own property in Iraq, and called on all of Islam to declare Jihad on the US for attacking Iraq? Funny brand of secularism if you ask me.
Well said. I don’t even live in America and I know the benefits of being an American, perhaps more so.
Do a search on my name and read any of my posts; I’ve had a bit of a vacation, but I’ve ALWAYS been anti-Bush, anti-NeoCon, and pro-Liberal. I’m just not a died in the wool knee-jerk radical like some on this board, and apparently that’s enough to attempt to draw and quarter moderates.
Agreed. I’ve always said here and elsewhere that the Iraq war was a mistake. I just don’t buy into the current arch-Liberal screed that everything America does is evil and we’re the font of all that’s bad in the world today. And I won’t for a second give Saddam or the Iranians a pass no matter what they history gives for justification.
You could be right, and I’m the first to admit that I estimated those figured based on my own personal view of Saddam and Iraq, but to my knowledge to be in the Ba’ath party you couldn’t be Shi’a and I’m pretty sure you couldn’t be Christian.
Quite possibly; he may have been a Tito-type, keeping a violent minority in check with brutal force, but we’ll never know.
I’d like to see a cite for that. The only example I could come up with was quite the opposite.
Then you’d be bitching that we raised the sea levels and destroyed all the beach front property…