(continued from part 1)
i have a question for my democratic friends who agree with me that we had to get rid of saddam. let’s say that the united states decided not to invade iraq, but that we still wanted to kick saddam out of power. how do you propose that we accomplish this goal? do we continue pushing the UN to keep an eye on saddam? do we make more threats? do we encourage the UN to pass more scary resolutions? WWJKD? (what would john kerry do? the world will thankfully never know.)
i have heard the argument that saddam was no more evil than dictators of other countries who treat their people worse than dogs, and that the united states doesn’t interfere militarily in all of those countries. i disagree with the first part, and acknowledge the second part. there are a few reasons why the united states doesn’t interfere militarily in every case of human rights violations or oppressive governments. for one thing, even though we have the best and most capable military in the world, there’s not enough of ’em to deal with all people struggling against their governments. saddam hussein’s iraq supported terrorism, which made it a top priority of previous and current presidential administrations. this made saddam a threat to the security of the middle east and also to the security of the united states. any links to al-qaeda are still to be conclusively proved in the minds of many. however, there are other groups associated with saddam that were involved in terrorist activity, as i’ve mentioned before.
for those who opposed the war in iraq from the beginning, and for those who oppose it now, that ship has sailed, ladies and gentlemen. what’s done is done. saddam is out of power. that’s a good thing. iraq is slowly progressing toward becoming a country friendly to democracy. the process is not as quick as we would all like to see, but there is no other alternative to seeing iraq through its current struggles.
ok…i’m ready now…bring on the violent disagreement. 🙂
Technorati Tags: saddam hussein, george w bush, iraq
Apply your same line of reasoning to Iran or any other country where a SH exists. How about Iran? If we follow what you’ve said here, then Iran is next, right? Hope not…but sooner or later, Iran’s nukes have got to go!
Pat,
There is more than one way to deal with Iran. We don’t necessarily have to invade their country to get the desired result. Maybe the same might have been true for Iraq, but I have yet to see a legitimate alternative plan that would have gotten rid of Saddam. I do agree that Iran having nukes is a very scary proposition, but I’m not sure we need to deal with it the same way that we dealt with Iraq.
Lisa,
Explain what you meant by there are other ways to deal with Iran that we hadn’t tried with Saddam for 12 years before Bush decided to go in and take him out of power.
Iran is threatening to destroy its neighbor in Israel and if the President of Iran continues on his path of developing a nuke weapon he will have the means to carry out his threat. It behoves all civilized nations that have the power to stop him from developing the nuke wewapon to do so now. You can’t stop it once he has developed it already.
Jon,
I understand the threat Iran poses. It is an extremely real one. We should absolutely do everything we can to keep Iran from getting nuclear weapons. If we want to take out their nuclear capabilities, we can do that without invading Iran. It is also in the interest of many other countries, some that the president of Iran might even listen to, to keep Iran from getting nukes. So we should absolutely explore the diplomatic angle before resorting to using force. Where this situation differs from Iraq is that we waited too long to address the threat. I don’t think we will make that mistake this time.
Sorry I’m so slow at getting to your posts. Last week was a crazy week for me.
I’m probably going to surprise you here and agree with you 😉
Saddam had to go. A post 9/11 world would not tolerate him. I think most people mistake my lack of support for Bush and this war as being against this war. I’m not, or wasn’t, I should say.
I was one of those chicken war hawks who argued how invasion would be so great and simple and yet wasn’t willing to give up my comfortable life and sign up. You know, kinda like Bush’s daughters, Cheney or Clinton during the 60s, Bill Kristol, Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, Savage, Bush and his national guard stint; I’m sure I could name more.
I realize now that my stance was wrong and invasion is much more serious and complicated than policy briefs and a good argument.
If anything, most people take my being against Bush as a liberal stance, and actually my stance in the beginning was the farthest thing from liberal that anything could be.
I argued for a much larger invasion force, for total war actually. Still to this day I can’t figure out why Bush didn’t call for 100,000 volunteers right after 9/11, cause he surely would have received a million and then we would have had plenty of manpower to fight this war on terror. Plenty of manpower to invade and occupy Iraq and whatever other country we had looked towards. I disagree with Bush in the most simplest of ways in that I argued for war because I believed 9/11 deemed it necessary, and not for war on the cheap without allies and without an American war effort back home which is what has happened and placed us in a terrible mess.
War requires sacrifice from more than just the military and their families. Surely after Vietnam, and because of 9/11, I thought we had figured that out. I was wrong. And so is Bush.
To stick to your text and to answer your question, I don’t know what John Kerry would have done. I’m assuming, giving his campaign stumps that he wouldn’t have differed all that much than Bush on Iraq. But I also realize that campaign stumps are pointless and forgotten once they are given, but really that is all any of us have to go by because it’s an event that never happened. We’ll just never know.
Just to end all of this on another twist, we didn’t need WMD to invade Iraq. We didn’t need any links to al Qaeda (which Saddam did not have) to invade. All of that was for the media and for the UK. We had 3,000 dead innocent people, we just needed better planning and competent government to carry it out.
Napoleon said if you’re going to take Vienna, take Vienna. The same is very true today. If we’re going to take Baghdad, take Baghdad.
Sorry this is long, but it’s been a while since I’ve done any commenting 🙂
Chris,
I am so glad that we are back to agreeing on something. 🙂 I much prefer agreeing with you to the alternative. This post was actually prompted by your original post on Saddam and the war. I was tempted to reply to it on your blog, because one of the other commenters kind of ticked me off with his generalizations about conservatives. These two posts are the result of that self-restraint.
I don’t think the country would be well-served if I signed up to go to Iraq. I have heard this argument before, and it does sound like a principled thing to do if you or I supported the war. But I’m not entirely convinced that those who haven’t served in the military were wrong in advocating the invasion of Iraq simply because they weren’t willing to give up their comfortable lives. (I’m sure there’s a simpler way to put that, but I couldn’t come up with one.)
I agree that Bush should have asked for more troops, although I’m not ready to see our military invade more than one country at a time. I’m uncomfortable with where the invasion of Iraq seems to be taking the rest of our foreign policy decisions, like Iran, for example.
Would it be nice for the US to have had more international support for the invasion of Iraq? Of course. It is my understanding that our coalition was more inclusive than the one put together during the first Gulf War, which had quite a bit of support internationally. Also, countries like France and Russia had a financial stake in the survival of Saddam. I’m sure those weren’t the only two with an interest in keeping Saddam alive and well and in power. How long could we have waited for other countries to come on board with us? Saddam wasn’t becoming any more compliant with the UN sanctions and restrictions placed on him, so something had to be done…with or without the help of other European “powers”.
The point you make about the American war effort is an excellent one. I think it is also a matter of selling the war to the American people, which Bush has failed to do. That’s a hard thing to sell when all the American people see on TV is more bombing and killing and the Iraqis arguing about the direction of the new government. I still think that the situation in Iraq can be resolved. I’m just not sure that the American people have the patience to wait too much longer for that to happen.
I think John Kerry might have done some of the same things Bush did, but I’m glad we didn’t have to find that out.
I don’t know whether the American people would have supported the Iraq war if they didn’t feel that it was some kind of payback for 9/11, or if they thought that Saddam had nothing to do with 9/11. I’m not entirely convinced that Saddam and al Qaeda had no links at all. Like I said before, that’s TBD, based on some of the information coming out now.
Glad you made it back from the Left Coast ok. Don’t worry about long comments…I’m used to them. 🙂
I am an Afghan expat currently living in Pakistan. What I haven’t been able to understand so far is: Why would the Americans think that an ordinary Iraqi is now better off than he/she was in the Saddam era? Why do they think that the Bush Administration has provided for a more stable government, better security, more jobs, better standard of life, peace, etc.? Is it that the pro-invasion-of-Iraq Americans have been so much caught up in the matrix of the “necessary illusions” spread up by the media that they can’t see the truth of the matter? Look at the daily bomb explosions, abductions, political turmoil, lack of a government (forget a stable one), unemployment, frustration, ethnic and religious fragmentation, etc. the invasion has brought up in Iraq. These phenomena weren’t present in Iraq in suc disastrous a scope during the Saddam era.
True Saddam was a dictator, true he was an illegitimate ruler, true he had been tyrannical at times, but the situation of Iraq under him was far better than it is now under the Bush Administration. More ironicaly, the situation is getting worse day by day.
It’s not only unilateral damage or colateral damage, it’s multilateral damage: The Americans, Iraqis, European troops, journalists, aid workers, peace activists and peole of all other spheres are suffering.
My message to the Bush Administration is: If you can’t make things better, please, please don’t make things worse for the ordinary Iraqis. They have been suffering under a dictator for ages; they don’t want to suffer under a flagbearer of “democracy” now.
Ahmad,
Thanks for taking the time to add your thoughts to this discussion. I appreciate it. I think that Americans find it hard to imagine that life under a dictator would be better for a country than the possibility of democratic elections and having the opportunity to vote for someone who is more representative of their values and views.
Has the execution of this war been flawless? Absolutely not. But I think the end result will be more positive than what we are seeing right now.
The problem that the United States has is that if we leave Iraq as quickly as the party in opposition is suggesting, the situation will get worse. That’s something we just can’t justify doing at this point.
Thanks again for your comments.
well, if uncle sam hadnt installed saddam in the first place, it wouldnt have had to remove him, now wd they?
iraq was democratic under Kassem when the united states installed saddam….and it looked away when saddam unleashed his dogs on the iraqis…in early 1980s or so, george bush sr lauded saddam cuz at that time he was killing iranians (who the US wanted destabilized)…
look i can go on and on…but it will just show that US does what it does for its narrow interests and in the meantime it keeps making its own citizens ignorant so that people dont gain a sense of history….
tell me, pray, why did you guys attack iraq when all the world knew that the osama was in pakistan? was it because your govt found an excuse to invade another country….
about your military being the best in the world…let me tell u something buddy….take away those B-52s and your army is shit….when they were in a war game excercise with indian troops last year, the marines were beaten by indians black and blue, you guys were useless in ordinary warfare, you can only kill unarmed citizens anyway….why do u think you have lost the war in iraq?…yeah u have already lost it, in case u didnt know…
I will have to dig into the history of Iraq more than I have already to address your point about Kassem. Based on the direction of Iran at the present time, I think the US did the right thing supporting Saddam.
The American people (in general) are fickle. They don’t have the attention span to get that sense of history. Our society exists on polls and soundbites and reality TV. As wonderful as it would be for the American people to get the perspective you suggest, it’s unrealistic at best.
The US doesn’t invade countries just for the hell of it. There is a great political risk to it, as Bush is finding out. You know the answer to your question. Iraq is just another piece of the puzzle in the GWOT. My guess is that we disagree on this point.
If we have lost the war in Iraq, explain why Zarqawi is packing up and leaving.