With the benefit of all that we learned from the aftermath of “Saddam and his sons” removal:
Could it be better to leave them in power? If so, under sanctions or not?
Were the sanctions and prolonged uncertainty really better then their forced removal?
Did anybody have a change of mind on the subject?
P.S. If you are going to say that Saddam removal is all right, but the way it was done was all wrong, kindly post your comments in this thread, which has an added benefit of Pit freedom from ceremony.
The belief I held after Gulf War 1 was that simply taking out Saddam and leaving Iraq to its own devices would likely result in another Islamic dictatorship. I don’t think the people would have been any better off.
Now that we are embarked in this experiment in nationbuilding, I don’t think we have much of a chance of preventing such an event anyway. At the very least, all of the fundamental Islamic laws and traditions that we just overturned will be re-enacted, and there will likely be a lot of rebellion and murders, probably until either the US or the UN gets fed up and steps in. I simply can’t see a US-made government lasting very long, and if it does, it would be a constant victim of terrorism.
Was Iraq better off under Saddam? I don’t think so. Did we make it worse by acting unilaterally? Probably. Would the Islamic world have accepted a UN force? That is a good question. They did between Israel and Egypt. It turns out that Saddam complied with the UN weapons inspectors. I think they very well could have.
There are other questions. What about the Kurds? Are they going to be pissed that they have to live under another dictatorship? Are they going to rebel for their free state? How will Turkey react? The second we leave, will Saudi Arabia collapse? Will we actually leave, or will Iraq be a giant US military base?
You can’t divide the “would it have been better to leave them in power” from the “will Iraq be better off after the US invasion” questions.
Tough questions. I guess it depends on your perspective.
From the US’s perspective, I think it WOULD have been better to just let them rot there. Eventually someone would have lit the fuse on the powder keg and the country would have blown apart…but it wouldn’t have been with the US sitting there. So, our hands would have been clean I guess you’d say. Thats all that counts, right?
From the Iraqi’s perspective? Probably better that we took them out in the long run. I think that the explosion is still coming, but it will be dampened down from what it would have been. With Saddam in power, a general uprising/rebellion would have been a VERY bloody affair. The uprising that will most likely happen when the US bolts will be much less bloody because there is no central organizing military force, only scattered factions. Most of the military heavy hardware is also gone now.
From the Worlds perspective? Well, The World™ should take a more active role in keeping an eye on the various monsters in power and perhaps actively do something about them. However, thats not going to happen. So, from The World™’s perspective I’d say it was neutral…it didn’t really effect them except those nations that were selling arms to Iraq or profitting by the Food for Oil scam…it hurt THEM, no doubt. But overall, as long as the oil flows it doesn’t really matter to The World™.
As its come out that there was a high level of corruption in the sanction system, and as I was unsure even at the time that sanctions were having any real effect on the leadership but hurting mostly the common people of Iraq (something SH was militantly indifferent too) I think that they should have been removed years ago. This would have given SH more of a free hand of course, but appearently the world consensus (now) is he was no threat at all and should have had such a free hand. If he wacked his citizens, that was his own affair and not our problem here in the US.
I’ve changed my mind on this whole issue and become much more cynical about it all. Generally speaking I see both the US and ‘The World™’ as hypocrites of the highest order, and while I’m pretty pissed off at the US I’m more contemptuous of ‘The World™’ as far as Iraq goes. My feeling now is basically fuck em. The US should not become involved in fixing the worlds problems under any circumstances including by UN ‘request’. GW was a fucking idiot to involve the US in Iraq for no good reason other than he WANTED to invade.
Because it seems like The World™ is collectively smarter than the Bush Administration, and realizes that meddling in the affairs of other countries is not something to be undertaken lightly… as Bush is learning now.
Well, as the Bush administration has shown its about as dumb as pocket lint as far as foriegn policy goes, so this isn’t saying much for The World™. That would make The World™ about as smart as…say, a rock.
The World™ has also acted stupidly and has meddled in the affairs of others to its hearts content, and continues to do so…especially those few who are ‘in the club’…i.e. on the UNSC. You are deluding yourself if you think that what the US/Bush did in Iraq is somehow beyond the pale or different. Its the same ole same ole…nations in the club do what they please and the only repercussions to them are possibly some negative opinions from other nations for a time. Lets look at what REALLY happened to the US as a consequence of its invasion of Iraq. No censure from the UN. A drop in The World™ public opinion of the US. No lessening of trade, sanctions, embargo, etc of the US. Sure Bush might and probably will go down in flames, but thats internal. The US is pretty much uneffected (except for the real negatives of our continued occupation…but The World™ isn’t doing that to us, we fucked ourselves as far as that goes).
The US is in the club. Hell, we are a founding member AND we have a key to the executive bathroom! Most of the other nations in the club, especially those on the UNSC have and will do pretty much what they want on the world stage without any serious repercussions. Today its the US in the dog house, such as it is. In the past its been Russia, France, Britian and China in there at one time or another.
Yes, I think it would have been better to leave Saddam in power. Yes, he was a brutal dictator, but anarchy and civil war are far worse and I think that’s where Iraq is headed, particularly if the Bush administration insists on sticking to its June deadline for pulling out. And when the civil war finally burns itself out in a decade or so, Iraq still won’t be a democracy. It will be another brutal dictatorship, albeit a poorer and more religious one.
I would have kept sanctions in place. They were clearly working and could have been sustained for many years for a fraction of the cost of the ongoing war. Sanctions had defanged Saddam’s military so he was no longer able to threaten his neighbors, and they had eliminated the chemical and biological weapons he was working on in the early 90’s.
At the same time I would have been working in diplomatic back channels to negotiate a rapproachement with Iraq. I can’t imagine Saddam backing down in his lifetime, but Uday and Qusay seemed venal enough to be vulnerable to cutting a deal. They also seemed stupid and brutal enough to make a real hash of running things, opening up additional opportunities for us to cut a deal with disgruntled subordinates. The long term goal should have been lessening of sanctions in response to a disavowal of regional aggression and the introduction of limited democracy at a local level.
Basically, the same strategy we’ve been using with Cuba, North Korea, China, most of the other unpleasant dictatorships around the globe … contain them, apply carrots and sticks to move them in the direction we want them to go, and wait for the tide of history to move in our favor.
I wish I had had a change of mind on the subject. This was basically my position a year ago, but I hoped that I was wrong. I hoped that neo-imperialism really had changed the old rules and the invasion would work.
I realize now, much to my dismay for the future of my country, that I was right. And I really don’t see any way out of this quagmire. Pulling out will pitch the country into civil war, destabilizing the entire region. Staying the course will mean thousands of American dead and only prolong the inevitable collapse. The best we can hope for I fear is to grit out teeth for the long slog and hope somewhere down the road three or five years from now we can cobble together some sort of stable government under a relatively innocuous strongman.
Shooting a dictator in the head, unlike what you may see in the movies, does not magically make everyone’s problems go away. Taking out Saddam in '91/'92 would have probably resulted in a Shia majority taking over and establishing another Islamic dictatorship, as I said.
Further, the UN hardly had the goal of nationbuilding. They knew better at the time. I suppose the US cound have acted unilaterally, but the net result is that we end up in the same place we are in now - looking like asses internationally, juggling to put a government in and prevent the people from rebelling, and facing 0% chance of success.
Some tough answers, too. I don’t agree with some points, at the same time find it very hard to argue. Seriously need to think it over. Appreciate all the responses.
First, effectiveness of sanctions. Saddam had to be kept constantly under the gun. That meant permanent expenditures, regular sorties and periodic bombings. Also local population hardships and political gains for terror advocates.
Second, and much bigger, from what I know about demise of repressive regimes, when they crumble, exactly the things that they suppress most brutally and successfully come back full force. That’s what happened in Soviet Union, that prized itself for eliminating organized crime, religious strife and ethnic animosity for 70 years. In reality for about 10 or 15 years before the official collapse of SSSR, those things were gaining force practically every day inside it. Finally KPSS couldn’t contain them any longer, gates burst and the whole Hell broke loose.
From what we see happening now in Iraq, the similar process was well advanced there, too. Saddam started as an agent for change in the ME, implementing many progressive measures, while employing brutal repression of dissent. As all dictators, he soon learned that progress is long, tedious and often inconvenient thing, while brutal repression has become a necessity. He kept his adversaries in check quite well, including religious and ethnic extremists and criminals; however, he was on the way out. At the same time we were undermining his authority by all possible means, from inside and outside. All those inspections must have been a real serious internal security problem for him. Now in Iraq we see armies, organized by religious or ethnic principles and we see strong criminal groups. Such things don’t spring to life overnight.
Russian situation was a lot less threatening, because it was self-contained. Russians don’t have hundreds of millions of “brethren” outside the country, there was no potent religious factor, no potent menace of ethnic upheaval outside Russia.
Your point is very convincing, but I still see the rationale for extraordinary measures.
That’s just it. In retrospect so many things appear unwarranted and even foolish. Knowing what we do now what kind of sham operation Saddam dictatorship was it’s mighty tempting to dismiss GW1 and sanctions as gross over-reactions to nothing. Looking back, it seems we could’ve lifted sanctions any time and nothing would happen. Also, it seems we didn’t really have to restore Kuwait back to the Emir. Why was it suddenly our problem? So Saddam wouldn’t stop there. Where would he go next? Way East was blocked by Iran, not that we wouldn’t rejoice at another Iraq-Iran war. So he’d take all the tiny Gulf states and monopolize good chunk of oil supplies. Big deal? So he’d take Saudi Arabia, then Jordan and came face-to-face with Israel. Considering how far-fetching such a scenario appears already, did we have to worry? Couldn’t we just wait and see? Couldn’t we let this fire burn out on its own? We could always intervene at any later moment.
So much for hindsight. Let’s go back in time and try to re-trace the steps forward. All we knew right after Saddam took Kuwait was that he had a huge army and he is spoiling for a fight. So people started saying, “Remember Hitler. Remember what happened when we compromised with Hitler.” Bush Sr. said, “This naked act of aggression will not stand”. Saddam was declared “new Hitler”. Soon you saw pick-up trucks plastered with “Nuke Iraq” signs. World approval for GW1 was practically unanimous, with almost all the Arab and Muslim countries among the most enthusiastic. Saddam was quickly beaten back and put under severe sanctions.
What bothers me most about the sanctions that there didn’t seem to be any clear plan to disengage. Suppose one has a fight and knocks the adversary down; one doesn’t want to stay over him and yell, “Stay down” forever. There must be a better way. Yet, all we knew was that Saddam was “playing dirty tricks” and that he had to stop “playing dirty tricks”. We fully believed the former and we didn’t question what exactly the qualifications were for the latter. Anyway, we accepted that and considered it a minor “annoyance”. Now we know that things didn’t stand still. On one hand Saddam abandoned all his plans for developing nasty weapons as being too risky; on another hand the sanctions became a local industry, constituting large chunk of local economy; meanwhile, big trouble was brewing in the region. So it went for 10 years.
Basically, we had three administrations, by both parties, opposite idelogies, and their solutions were:
Teach Saddam a lesson
Keep Saddam under sanctions
Take Saddam out.
Was there a better solution?
In no way am I saying, “Let’s cut and run now!” We are doing good thing and we have to stay the course. We are doing excellent job, too. Look what Russians are going through in Chechnya: they have defeats, they loose platoons, they loose 100+ troops at a single helicopter shoot-down, they have terrorists penetrating into the Capital and blowing dozens of people, they are way more hard-up, way more messed-up, they have half the population we do… I don’t support what Russians are doing in Chechnya, but does it look like they will ever go back? Hell, look at Chechens, a tiny nation, look what they are going through. Are they complaining? Does it look like they are going to give up? This world is full of very tough people locked at loggerheads with each other. We need to be smarter then the rest, but we need to be at least as tough as the rest.