Here’s an idea, not orginally mine, but why not just make Saddam honcho again? Seriously. What are the downsides? I know there are some, but is it at least conceivable that the benefits would outweigh them? I’m not trying to be provocative. I’d really like to read other doper’s opinions on this.
From my perspective I don’t see how having Saddam back in power could possibly be any worse than the options left to us at this point.
Mods, please feel free to move this thread if you feel it’s in the wrong place. I just figured it’d end up here anyway.
As a dictator he was able to hold the factions together. We are trying to do that now. But, I fear that ship has sailed.He wouldnt work out now because his control over the army is gone.
Well for one, it’s not our decision to make. And I don’t see how it would make things any better. Saddam’s infrastructure of conrtol no longer exists, so we would have to stay in Iraq and enforce that policy.
As I said in the other thread, though, I still think (as I always have) that once we get out of there, democracy will crumble and some sort of strongman will emerge to run things. Let’s just hope he’s a “nice” strongman. But he’ll probably be a Shiite, not a Sunni Arab.
Even if putting Saddam back in power were possible, what makes you think he could calm things down at this point? Oh, perhaps (perhaps mind you), he could get SOME of the Sunni to stop blowing their fellow Iraqi’s apart…but the Shi’ite majority? Even assuming somehow the army could be turned over to Saddam intact, that it would be loyal and do his bidding, there would be a full scale civil war if Saddam came back into power. As bad as things are in Iraq atm, I don’t think that folks on this board really have a solid concept of what a REAL full scale civil war in Iraq would look like. Instead of insurgent violence, terrorist acts, IED’s, car bombs, etc, you’d have set piece battles with thousands involved, cities being assaulted and taken, wholesale slaughter of Iraqi civilians (as opposed to the retail slaughter we currently see), etc etc. Think the Iraq/Iran war, but in the heart of Iraq…or think post-Soviet Afghanistan. It would be a blood bath. And Saddam being in power would do more to set the fuse than than anything else I can imagine, short of the US stating we were anexing Iraq for its oil and making it a new state.