And what is your point for telling us that? Bush referred to S.H. not letting the inspectors in after November 2002 after UNSC 1441 had been passed and S.H. most clearly did in fact let the inspectors in.
Sorry, I needed to add a :rolleyes: to my statement. What I mean is that was likely The Shrubs justification for such a bald-faced lie.
My point has always been- GWB and the UN using threats to force SH to let Blix back in was reasonable and backed by most of the UN. But once Blix didn’t find anything, using force was unjustified. The invasion was immoral.
What I think is that GWB thought for sure SH wouldn’t do it, he convinced himself so much that SH wouldn’t let Blix back in, that later he simply acted as if he hadn’t. I.e. Bush was a little insane.
I agree in part, but don’t like “The invasion was immoral.” Saddam was an unusually brutal and heinous dictator – to use force to replace him with a better pro-Iraq government would have been very “moral” and celebrated greatly by most Iraqis, even if the new government still came from the Sunni minority. Such a war might have been foolish and illegal, but it wouldn’t be “immoral.”
(Of course my point is hypothetical. Given the true motives of the Cheney-Rove cabal, and the cynical hypocrisy with which they managed the aftermath, the actual war was extremely immoral.)
Oh come on. He was no Pol Pot. And even then, outside the US, nobody except Tony Blair expected invaders to be “celebrated”. Anyone who has read anything about history knows that invaders are rarely welcome.:rolleyes:
Are we speaking of the same Saddam Hussein ?
Are we speaking of the same celebrations ?
True, hence my point earlier that “Saddam was an evil asshole” as one of the reasons give for the war, and the sole reason that was found to be more true than we thought.
But if the USA gets into the business of deposing every evil dictator in the world, we’ll need a bigger military.
Saddam was indeed a thoroughly nasty dictator. I believe he modeled himself on Stalin, hence the moustache and callous disregard for human life. But I don’t think there was much moral high ground to be won in removing him given the history of support he had been given in the past, when he was a US ally.
He had been around a long time and he was once a firm friend of the US and Iraq received a great deal of military aid from the US when it invaded Iran.
Note some of the familiar names here:
The fact is, after the invasion of Kuwait and the US led first Gulf War he was contained militarily from attacking other countries.
He put down the Shias in the south, draining the marches and gassed the Kurds in the north and recovered his control over the country. Iraq was stable but its people impoverished by sanctions. It was not a threat.
From a geo-political point of view, this looked like a smart move by Bush senior. Iraq sanctioned and inspected to ensure it was no threat to the Israelis or the Saudis or the Kuwaits or anyone else. But still with an intact political and military structure that served as a counterweight to Iran.
That balance of power was completely trashed by the invasion of 2003 in an action that defied the best advice of the military and wiser council in the US.
The hunt for the perpetrators of 9/11 took place in Afghanistan and Pakistan where they were hiding.
The Iraq invasion of 2003 was a more to do with what was going on inside the US than in the Middle East. A weakened, friendless Iraq was a soft target for a military campaign that liberated huge expenditure by the US tax payer.
It is not the first internal competition for tax dollar spending within the US that has not spilt out to international wars with huge expenditure that benefited vested interests.
The War on Drugs was, maybe, a similar thing.
The world is a dangerous enough place already without the most powerful nation engaging in these wasteful and pointless escapades.
Better to keep the powder dry for when it is really needed.
I agree with all of this. I was not arguing in favor of the 2003 war, just strongly objecting to characterizing an attack to remove Saddam as “immoral.” And of course it’s absurd to imagine that his removal did not fill most Iraqis, at first, with great joy.
The newspaper article I linked to above about gouging eyes out etc. was from after the 2003 invasion, but I read such reports in American magazines like Atlantic in the late 1980’s. (And yes, it is disgusting that such reports were available then, when Cheney and Rumsfeld were supplying their “friend” Saddam with money, arms, and intelligence.)
Because it was there, I guess. :rolleyes:
The whole idea behind the movie “Fahrenheit 9/11” is that the Iraq war was concocted to keep Halliburton in business. It wouldn’t surprise me if this was indeed the reason.
His inspiration was Saladin, not Stalin.
He also modeled himself after Nebuchadnezzar the Great. :smack: Recall that that King, before destroying the First Temple, allegedly built the Hanging Gardens of Babylon and had his name inscribed on the bricks.
Saddam’s project (how far did it get?) was to rebuild the Gardens in Babylon, inscribing Saddam on the bricks.
My sentiments exactly since ‘a little insane’ is a similar way of saying that after 9/11 Bush was not acting rationally very much. That was until he started claiming that he wanted to disarm Iraq of WMD peacefully.
So what do you do if you are in the US Senate and your president has been acting a bit insane for two years and suddenly starts speaking in rational terms claiming that he wants to avoid war if at all possible.