I've been thinking about Iraq.

[Guy Fawkes]

I believe that the war in Iraq was and is a bad idea. However, I'm starting to wonder if, perhaps, we should have done something anyway. While I am upset that we were missled with stories of WMDs and Al Qaeda links; perhaps it's for the best. We did get rid of a dictatorship and (almost) install a democracy. That has to count for something. And while I would have favored doing it peacefully, or at least in a way with less military/civilian losses...

Anyone agree? Will history see this as the right thing just done the wrong way?

on edit: spelling.

[swag]

1. Democracy? I don't see any democracy.

[Guy Fawkes]

2. Pseudo-democracy. Hopefully...

they'll make it a real democracy once * and his cronies leave.

[TrustingDog]

4. and when would That be?

like neva?

[Guy Fawkes]

6. Once Kerry wins the election ^_^

[swag]

7. What we have made is a horrible and hellish mess, one that

generations will be cleaning up, should the species last so long.

I appreciate your hope, but we have created a monstrous human calamity.

[wtmusic]

8. And it all boils down to a simple fact:

our invasion was predicated on fear and not on justice, and the whole world knows it.

[NJCher]

22. 'scuse me but

our invasion was predicated on fear and not on justice, and the whole world knows it.

our invasion was predicated on greed and not on justice, and the whole world knows it.


Cher

[wtmusic]

3. No, no, a thousand times no

You are apparently also being misled with stories of a "democracy".

It's not only *not* for the best, it will go down as one of the darkest chapters in American history and will deliver repercussions for decades.

[slinkerwink]

5. That dictatorship kept the Shiites from Killing the Sunnis, and the Kurds

from killing everyone else. Women had more rights in that dictatorship than they do now.

[The Traveler]

16. You have a point

that few are willing to contemplate at the moment. The simple fact is we have made things potentially far worse. Had the Iraqis been able to rise up together against his regime, they would have had a chance for liberty.

To quote Malcom X (and Thomas Paine would have agreed with this) "No one can give you your freedom and dignity. If you are a man, you will take it."

Saddam's regime was horrible. What will replace it is likely going to be worse.

[Name removed]

9. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[Guy Fawkes]

11. No.

All people are entitled to their own opinions. What we believe to be the truth about * is just a bunch of BS to them and vice-versa. Please, do not go inciting riot on forums where people have a different point of view.

[puerco-bellies]

10. We removed a Dictatorship and replaced it with

a Dictatorship. Other then that we thrown away the lives of 900+ American men and women, and countless Iraqis'. Not to be rude but sell that bullshit elsewhere.

[Guy Fawkes]

12. "Not to be rude but sell that bullshit elsewhere"

riiiight.

[slinkerwink]

17. look at post #5

[Kanary]

13. Where does this question come from?

Is this the result of a lot of "explaining" about a IWR vote?

Kanary, more and more depressed with acceptance for war without end.

[sandnsea]

14. Don't think so

The only way this will ever be seen as the right thing is if a whole bunch of unknown stuff from other countries in the ME surfaces. Even if this thing had gone like clockwork, overthrowing a regime on false pretenses is just not something we would ever be able to crow about. Kind of like Vietnam, the stench just never goes away.

[wuushew]

15. No that is the omelet theory of foreign policy...break a few eggs

If we constantly interfere in the affairs of other countries then how we ever know that our actions resulted in outcomes superior to the natural course of events? China is coming along, Libya, Syria. The only thing we have to offer is the blunt instrument of force.

I do not think that the American sense of morality has advanced much from the War of 1812, Mexican-American War or Spanish American War. The U.S. has never altruistically engaged in war for the benefit of mankind, rather we fool ourselves into thinking our goals are noble to aswage a deep sense of guilt that would otherwise result.

[DrWeird]

18. Tell it to this guy.

[TreasonousBastard]

19. History is not written yet...

and we don't know what the consequences of this will be down the road.

But, this business of getting rid of dictators is interesting. The first problem, of course, is to define just what a "dictator" is. Remember the Reagan bullshit about the fine line of distinction between "authoritarian" and "totalitarian" regimes?

Then we get to the point of who decides, and who acts. Someone has to decide which brutal tyrants have gone over the edge enough to warrant intervention into their sovereign borders. Someone then has to invade those sovereign borders, throw out the tyrant, and set up a new government.

There has never been a system of international cooperation for this sort of thing in history. Every time it has actually happened, the alliances were temporary, and for the safety or convenience of the allies.

If we had a working UN with such police powers, the Sudan situation, along with many others, would have been taken care of long ago. Saddam Hussein's Iraq may have had many problems, but it was far from the worst regime on this pitiful planet.

[wuushew]

20. Also Saddam is an elderly and sick man

one of his sons was an invalid and the other was a valid target for an assaination or coup.

The Baath party existed before Saddam became prominent and was able to run Iraq effectively as a nation. The war accomplished nothing that time would have done anyway.

[eridani]

21. Have you never heard of Ferdinand Marcos?

Or Nicolai Ceausescu? Or Shah Reza Pahlevi? Jeezus fawking Keerist! People are perfectly capable of removing their own dictators without a bunch of foreign military boots in their faces, not to mention killing >10,000 of them and scattering depleted uranium and unexploded cluster bombs all around, and trashing their infrastructure. The Iraqis were well on their way to throwing Saddam out in 1991, and were stopped when the US directly intervened on Saddam's side to prevent this.

The purpose of the invasion was to set up permanent military bases there, regardless of what the inhabitants thought of that, and to install another dictator more obedient to the US. No democratic decisionmaking by Iraqis could ever result in permission to have complete foreign takeover of their economy and permanent foreign military installations. The administration actually said that the invasion was on EVEN IF SADDAM AND HIS SONS LEFT.

If we had followed Jimmy Carter's plan of trading an end to the sanctions in return for permanent weapons inspection, the 90% of the population could have gotten off of complete reliance on the government for food. Saddam was getting seriously disconnected from reality, and his sons were spoiled brats more interested in their privileges than in governing. A repeat of 1991 might well have been in the cards eventually.

[NJCher]

23. latest count

I believe the latest count on the Iraqi civilian death total is something like 13,000. Heard it on an interview on NPR; person interviewed has a Web site that tries to keep track of the deaths.


Cher

[Kanary]

24. I read yesterday it was 35,000, but now I can't tell you where I saw that

I know it was credible, but......

So many facts, so little time.

It really sux that there has been such an effort to keep this covered up! I'm so ashamed of my government I can't even begin to express it!

Kanary

[NJCher]

25. yikes!

I wonder if I mis-heard it. The radio was a distance from me. 35,000 could sound like 13,000. Oh man, I hope not.


Cher

[Kanary]

30. Oh, I'm not at all saying you "misheard" it!

I think that we have been so screwed up by the misadministration that sources are doing their best to keep a count, but don't have the resources to take everything into account. (or something -- I'm not feeling well, and maybe not being very coherent).

It could be that the source you heard didn't have hard evidence, so was being conservative in their assessment.

This is all one big mess, brought to you by Halliburton. I'm so sick of my government I want to scream.

Kanary
I'm going to edit this to add -- I also don't have much confidence that these "sources" are doing a very good job of communicating well with each other, so that could also add to the confusion. They don't seem to want to investigate enough that it would encourage them to work together. Just my guess.

[JSJ]

26. if you want to install a democracy and get rid of a dictator...

...then you shoud start right here at home- if the US is your home. The people of Iraq did nothing to deserve the brutal loss of lives and their homes at the hands of our marauding troops.

[lostnfound]

27. Exchanged one ugliness for another.

Imagine if it was YOUR children killed in this war..Would it be possible for you to even ask this question?

The death toll of Iraqis SO FAR is likely close to 1 in 600. Scaled up for US population, this would be equivalent to perhaps 400,000 deaths in the US. That's just deaths -- not wounded or maimed or blinded, not destroyed homes, not emotionally traumatized. 2/3 of Iraqi men are currently unemployed. Their country is littered with armament.

"We should have done something anyway"--yes, we should have done the right thing the right way. If we had the right motives, we might have been able to figure out what that was.

"The right thing just done the wrong way"..I think that's an illogical construct. If you are "doing the right thing", it means by necessity that you are doing it the right way. Unless what you really mean is that "you had good intentions"..which in this case, we know that we did NOT have good intentions.

What I think you are trying to say is that perhaps we achieved the "right outcome". The reality is only that we exchanged one ugliness for another.

If you poll Iraqis, by the way, the vast majority say it was better to live with Saddam than to live with this occupation.

What you can say is that the actions which we took for the wrong reasons had a fortunate side-effect. That is about all you can say about it.

[Fleshdancer]

28. I'm afraid that history will view Saddam's capture as a unique positive to

an overall bad situation. The same people who keep telling us that Saddam was a horrible guy are also telling us that the only way to keep order in Iraq and to stop the violence is by being, well, violent.

I don't understand the difference between our actions and Saddam at this point. Brutal Dictatorship? Is brutal occupation any better? Mass graves? How many Iraqi civilians are dead due to this war?

I think we're just throwing words of comfort out there at this point (democracy, freedom, self-rule, etc) but the definition of those words don't match the reality of the situation. What good is a Democracy in Najaf when it's being attacked right now as I write this?

[JSJ]

29. don't forget whose man saddam was (he was a cia asset/assassin)

[Texasgal]

31. No... I do not agree!

Iraq is a mess right now.... they are worse off then when Saddam was in power. Sure, Saddam was a tyrant, but he never posed a serious threat to the US, IMO. I think we have spent waaaay too much money in Iraq, lost waaaaay to many lives, while Afganistan continues to faulter.... sad.

[truthspeaker]

32. "almost install a democracy" HA HA HA HA

You're not that naive, are you? Bushco never intended to install a democracy.

I maintain, as I did 18 months ago, that Saddam needed to be dealt with eventually in some manner, but not now and definitely not this way.

[EndElectoral]

33. Let's see..record gas prices, terrorism alerts, massive deficits, and ...

corporate corruption, misinformation, no real democracy in Iraq, dead American soldiers, dead Iraqi civilians, and no real end in sight..yeah, this was really worth it..NOT!!!

[ProfLefty]

34. History.

More than likely history will view our unprovoked invasion and conquest of Iraq exactly as it was: an ill conceived, overly aggressive, poorly planned example of western imperialism at its very worst.

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

35. "We had to burn down the village in order to save it."

Same rationale. Didn't work well in '68, isn't going so well now.

We also "got rid" of the evil Kaiser in 1918 and "installed democracy" in Germany. The result...Hitler was elected.

We "got rid" of Saddam, a dictator standing in quicksand who was going to fall anyway.

Now, by our "installation of democracy" (an oxmoron) we have inflamed the entire region and contributed to the very thing that it was advertised to stop - terrorism. We have also managed to turn most of the world against us.

"That has to count for something."

Yeah, so far about 14,000 dead Iraqis, 900+ dead GI's, and the "count" is rising.

[Dyedinthewoolliberal]

36. Ummmmmm

I can't tell if you are serious or not. I understand trying to make the best of a bad situation, but in no way, would I ever think what is happening over there is for the best. Certainly not in the way it has been handled.
You know Saddam wasn't much more than the Mayor of Baghdad anyhow. If we were truly interested in the welfare of the Iraq people, we would have lifted the sanctions imposed after Gulf War 1