When I read / hear people discussing the invasion, it is mostly critical of it, and the discussion is always focused on whether Osama Bin Laden was there at the time, or whether Saddam had nuclear weapons. The “humanitarian” side talk about how many people were killed, and think it was bad for this reason.
What I don’t understand is why nobody talks about the huge humanitarian aspect, of removing one of the most vile and oppressive dictators from power. Overall, at the cost of some resources, and relatively few lives, you have actually achieved to lift this oppression. (There are still a lot of problems of course, but in the end it will be better than living under Saddam and his terrible regime.)
People are mostly for the american civil war, because it was against slavery, and for the second world war because it was against Hitler. I don’t think Saddam’s actions were less bad than those two things, only smaller in scale. Why is this never the focus of the discussion?
The world is definitely a better place without Saddam Hussein in it, but the way we took him out stunk. We invaded a sovereign nation without provocation, captured a sitting head of state, “encouraged” the locals to set up a kangaroo court to give him a farcical trial with a foregone conclusion, and handed him over for execution. That’s just not something most Americans are proud of doing.
Because we went into Iraq for false reasons. We went in because Saddam had weapons of mass destruction and was a threat to America. Both of those were false. We also claimed he was helping AQ. He was not.
Then Bush claimed humanitarian grounds of removing a "bad guy’ I still can’t believe the president used such a kiddie term.
We have propped up dictators for decades. We have no problems with that. But this one needed to be taken out. The one with the oil.
Before we went in, Cheney and the oil companies had already divided the oil spoils among themselves.
I stopped keeping track of how many americans have been killed in the iraq feasco when it reached 2x the 9/11 toll. Pretty much all the estimates of Iraqi civilian deaths are in the 100s of thousands. So the blood price was far more than a few lives even if you take the republican approach of ignoring Iraqi casualties.
Many veterans who survived Iraq are physically and or mentally damaged to the point of being unable to function without expensive support. Look into the suicide rate among thes vets.
Then there is Afganistan, which will now most probably be lost to the Taliban as a direct and forseeable effect of diverting resources to Iraq.
Then ther is the fact that our leaders engaged in a calculated campaign of lies and distortion to gin up public and congressional support for the invasion.
Then there is the fact that the party that were the main hawks used accounting tricks and concealed the cost of the war so that they could maintain low tax rates for thier patrons. Then when they lost power immediatly started calling for austerity measures…none of which impact those patrons.
Because there’s one less murderous bastard in charge of a country, and that country is less of a hell hole than it used to be. Might even turn out to be a functional democracy in the foreseeable future. Not a bad outcome, all things considered–but the end does not justify the means used to achieve it.
The Bush administration and its supporters certainly tried to shift the focus to that once it was proved that the so-called WMDs didn’t exist. But that’s not what they used as their excuse to invade, and they never would have gotten the support of Congress to invade on humanitarian grounds.
Then, there is the massive lack of planning about the post invasion actions. The administration really thought they could get in and get out and that everything would be just hunky dory. And you can say it was “relatively few” lives lost, but it was over 100,000 with at least 10 times that many turned into refugees.
Not to mention the fact that we have no idea what things are going to look like once we’re really out of there, and what role Iran is going to play in the future development of Iraq. This thing ain’t over yet.
No it isn’t. Maybe it’s better off now than in the immediate aftermath of your invasion, but I would not point to a partial recovery from your invasion as justification for that invasion.
So the world is a better place on the grounds that maybe, in some yet-to-be-determined fashion and at an undetermined time, Iraq may turn out to have a different system of government, one like that of the country that invaded it under false pretenses and had its citizens tortured? How has that made the world a better place over the past 8 years?
Neither did I. We had no damn business invading Iraq.
No, the world is a better place for having one less asshole in power, period. Iraq today is better off than they were under Saddam. They have a chance to make a lasting change for the better, which they did not have under Saddam. Maybe they’ll make it work. Maybe in five years they’ll go back down the shitter. Time will tell.
I fail to see what in the world has actually improved because of the invasion of Iraq. Your country’s economy took a hit and countless people in Iraq are dead, displaced, maimed, wounded, orphaned, or have had their livelihoods destroyed because of it. What’s better?
How many people do you believe Saddam’s government murdered per year? Because right now, based just on press reports, there is expected to be roughly 4,000 Iraqi deaths due to terrorist bombings, gunfire, or executions. That’s essentially unchanged from 2010, but (thank goodness) down from the documented murders of 28,000 in 2006 and 25,000 in 2007. Link.
I couldn’t guess, but I just have a hard time seeing Saddam’s thugs killing thousands of Iraqis year in and year out.
What constitutes “relatively few”? Estimates of the number of lives lost in the war, whether gross or net, are in the hundreds of thousands. The worse-than-stupid way we went about it is responsible for a large part of that number, even if you take it as a given that it should have been done. So, again, “relatively few” is relative to *what *for you?
As to the country we turned Iraq into, it’s one with a destroyed infrastructure, general chaos, widespread ethnic killings, an de facto partitioning. The conditions that lead to the ability of a military strongman (and don’t kid yourself that Saddam was anything unusual along those lines, despite the propaganda) still exist, and perhaps are even stronger now. Do you really think the next guy, or guys fighting it out, is going to be better?
Whose views and opinion of that is relevant? Ours, or the Iraqi people’s? Polls are skimpy and unreliable on that point, but they do show general disagreement on that point - as you might expect given what their country is reduced to.
We eliminated American slavery permanently, and eliminated the ability of German totalitarianism to reappear permanently. But what have we permanently changed for the better in Iraq? We also didn’t lie our way into the Civil War or WW2.
Having ruled Iraq for about 25 years, any of the estimates > 100,000 would fit the bill, although doubtful those numbers were distributed evenly throughout those 25 years.
I think the problem with the argument that “Saddam was a bad guy so it was worth it to get rid of him” ignores what follows from that argument. There are a bunch of bad guys in the world. Hell, we’ve got one 90 miles south of Florida.
If we make it our policy to invade a country at a cost of thousands of American lives just to overthrow a bad guy, then we will wipe out millions of young American lives.
We were told that we needed to get rid of Saddam because he had WMDs and was close to developing nuclear weapons. Fresh after 9/11, it was unacceptable to allow a middle eastern dictator to have those. I supported the invasion for these reasons.
However, I’ll give Bush enough credit to say that a mistake was made instead of a deliberate lie. Hell, France and Germany agreed that Iraq had WMDs, they just thought that sanctions should be used instead of an invasion.
Whatever happened, we fucked up big time as the WMDs did not exist and our reason for going to war was never there.
Not likely to prevail under any circumstances. What makes you think that all we needed to do was to kill more people? It might actually be worse had we had 100,000 more troops there. Keep in mind that the big neighbor to the east, Pakistan, has no interest in a strong, stable Afghanistan. Quite the opposite. That’s the problem, and having more troops in Afghanistan isn’t going to change that one bit, except for the worse.
Besides, it assumes that who follows won’t be a bad guy, whatever you define that to be.
He may have made a mistake in believing the stories Cheney told him, but the Bush *administration *did lie, and arguments to the contrary are severely lame.
Yes, the Animal House excuse: “Hey, you fucked up! You trusted us!”
No, it isn’t true that any government honestly believed Iraq had WMD’s, only that most thought it *possible *and that inspections were needed to establish the facts. Cheney’s desperation to begin the attack when he did, when the inspections were about to confirm indisputably that they didn’t exist, is pretty solid proof that the administration was indeed lying.