Another massive truck bomb killing at least 60 in Sadr City, Islamic State claiming responsibility. About a third of the country in the hands of terrorists now. Sure, Saddam was an old brute but maybe it takes a brute to hold the peace and keep the country together. Do any Iraqis, even Shi’ites, look back and miss the guy? How ever many people he killed and tortured the IS is multiplying a hundredfold. Many Shi’ites naturally celebrated the downfall of Saddam. If they could have seen what was coming would they have thought twice.
In the final analysis bringing down Saddam wasn’t an Iraqi decision. It was a Bush decision. In hindsight, was it a bad one?
I’m sure most Sunni Arabs are nostalgic. I wouldn’t be surprised if a good chunk of the Shi’a Arabs, too. I’d be shocked if any significant number of Kurds are.
I still think it’s too early to answer the question, though. If you were living during the American Civil War, would have thought it was foolish to have broken off from the British some 90 years earlier? I think we can safely say that the WAY we brought SH down was foolish, but whether it was foolish to take him down is debatable.
Foggy Bottom told Bush not to do it. Saddam was stable, and he was secular. There was a very high chance of a post-Saddam Iraq being worse. There were other reasons it was a bad idea for the USA, but yeah, the State Department said it was a bad idea for Iraq.
I think Iraqis, excepting the Iraqi Kurds, would have been better off from the date of our invasion until the Arab Spring. Considering the fates of Yemen, Egypt, Libya, and Syria, I doubt Iraq would have escaped the chaos. In fact, the no fly zone would almost guarantee a civil war since the Iraqi ground forces are pathetic at best.
Kinda weird trying to figure out whether “Iraq” would have been better off, since it is such a fucked up place with such artificial (unsustainable?) boundaries. Some would have been better off - others, just as dead. Hard to see how some significant civil strife would not be inevitable without a harsh regime. So, is the suppressed group better off one way or the other? Would local residents - and the world in general - be better off with a Balkanization of the mideast?
The point is that we deliberately introduced a power vacuum in the ME. Whether saddam was good or bad is irrelevant-we now have a situation in which chaos reigns. Frankly, I predicted this, and I think that chaos will reign there for quite a while. Setting up “governments” as we attempted in iraq, will not work.
The really scary thing-what if Saudi arabia falls? Who knows what might happen then.
It all depends on what would have happened w/o the US having taken out SH. Would SH have survived the Arab Spring? Would it have been worse having SH gone and no stabilizing force there (even a fucked-up one like the US had)?
Who knows. One shouldn’t assume that the only choices are SH or the situation as it is now.
In answer to the OP question: It depends. The Kurds and Shites would still be getting the dirty end of the stick, democracy would not be around, and the country would be held together by force in many places. But it would be more (or less) peaceful and Saddam, having been disarmed in GW I, would be more worried about his neighbors in Iran than with us.
Of course, once Saddam died (he was 66 in 2003, so if he would still be in power now is YMMV), we might well have the same, or even worse problems than there are now, as various neighbors tried to help themselves to portions of a disintegrating country (again, IMHO, but I’m looking at Yugoslavia after Tito, or the Ottomans post-WWI).
As for the unasked question, would the rest of the world have been happier with Saddam in charge, I think the answer (perhaps in hindsight) would be yes. He was a known factor, he had been militarily defanged, and he kept the oil flowing (the Oil must flow!). Like Tito (or Stalin for that matter), while we disapproved of the Iron Fist, we also benefited by knowing he was sitting on trouble-makers in his region (remember, the Oil must Flow!). Without him…well, as we’ve seen, things get a bit…murky.
How do you know that? Assuming you mean “more or less”, and not making the obvious observation that it might be more peaceful than now or less peaceful.
Had there been no Arab Spring, it might be reasonable to assume that SH would still be in power had the US not invaded. But there WAS an Arab Spring, and a lot changed in that part of the world. Iraq might look like Syria does right now.
ETA: Assad has friends in high places (Russia and Iran) to help prop him up. SH had no such friends. And with the US and other countries enforcing a now fly zone, there’s a very good chance a Civil War would have broken out.
n.b.: I am NOT, NOT, NOT justifying the US invasion of Iraq. I’m just saying one shouldn’t assume that Iraq today would look like it did in 2002 had the US not invaded in 2003.
Saudi Arabia needs to go, they and the GCC are the ones who have (with ourselves) facilitated the rise of extremism and held the entire Arab world back. Saudi Arabia shouldn’t be the regional leader of the Arabs, it is an anachronism, it should be rightly Egypt, but because Egypt is broke and Saudis have lots of Oil, they’re in charge.
Oh yes. Read the stats on Iraq deaths and homelessness; a big diaspora of Iraq’s educated professionals. The Bush Adventure was a tragedy for Iraq, a huge waste of goodwill and treasure by the Americans, and helped provoke ongoing strife. OP’s question is hardly worth asking.
Yes, Saddam was heinous, but he was in a box. He was treating his own people better (their biggest problem was U.S.-led sanctions). Saddam was aging and weakening and it’s easy to imagine his replacement with a less vile Baathist dictator. Indeed, either Bush-41 or Bush-43 could probably have induced a Baghdad coup. (And Saddam was manipulable until the 1991 miscommunication re Kuwait.)
Breaking into the box to wage war was taken from cynical motives; it is one of the saddest and most despicable episodes of my life.
The worry about artificial boundaries is overblown. Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran, Saudi, etc. all have more natural boundaries yet also suffer severe problems. True, disparities in Iraq may increase the need for strong-man rule, but successful Western-style democracy may be hard in some cultures anyway.
Yes. I’m on record in the N.Y.Times opinion page that my cognizance isn’t just in hindsight. What about you, ralph124c ? Did you write your Congressman?
And what’s this about the House of Saud falling? (I don’t follow news much.) Not if ¡Jeb! wins the White House I suppose; sometimes it semes like the Bush family is bought and paid for by Saud.
I agree but I’m not sure blaming Bush is accurate. This was right-wing imperial ideology on a grand scale. The good folks at PNAC,etc planned for this for years. It was to be the American Century.
Extremist idiots have been around and are still with us now, and growing in power. (The FairTax of 2015 now has 200,000 Google hits. :smack: )
The problem was electing the weak-willed warped-vision GWB and the ghastly advisors he selected. But yes, GWB himself might avoid “blame.” Blame the rotting GOP for its candidate selection process and the American voter for giving him 48% of their vote.
There’s plenty of blame to spread around, but it makes no sense to me not give the lion’s share of it to the guy at the top. The buck stops there.
So, yeah, blame Cheney and Rumsfeld and the rest of them, too. But Bush is the one and only one guy who could have stopped it. No other single person could have done that.
