Let's settle this...

[manic expression]

I am so tired of hearing that Saddam was the most horrible ruler since Genghis Khan. I even hear it from a lot of Democrats. There are governments that are just as bad that the U.S. actively supports.....
Remember all of those mass graves we were supposed to find? They were much, much smaller than expected. Most of them were the remains of the Shia uprising that Bush I encouraged, and then abandoned, so their blood is on the U.S.'s hands as much as Saddam's.
I want to see people's opinions on how much of a "monster" Saddam was in the first place.

[echochamber]

1. I personally think Saddam was a bad guy..his sons as well

Torture, rapes, murder..I can't think of anything good about them personally.

[manic expression]

10. Hmm.....

that kind of reminds me of......what was that again?....OH YEAH! THE U.S. OCCUPATION!!!
We support Azerbaijan, which does the same thing. We also support Nepal, which pretty much suspended human rights and popular representation for a prolonged period. And what of our good friend Kim-Jong Il? (sorry if I spelled his name wrong)

[amber dog democrat]

17. Given that the US has a long history of supporting thugs like that

Sukarno
Pinochet
The Shaw
Ferdinand Marcos
The Greek generals
Samosa
El Salvador's Death Squads
Honduras Death Squads
M'buto Sesiseko
Noriega
The Taliban
Park Chung Hee
D W Botha
Afghan Warlords, ( Mujahadeen )
Ariel Sharon

and Sadam

its a long list of credits. Once a dictator has passed his usefullness, we'll take them out if we can. They do our dirty work for us. We seem to like dictators as long as they stay bought and don't carry on too high.

Yes Sadam Evil, blah blah blah

however there was no justification for the invasion and occupation.

[CornField]

2. I believe Saddam was quite insane

I also believe it takes a special kind of "criminality" to provide weapons of mass destruction to someone that you know has an elevator that doesn't hit the top floor. I'd love to see the lot of the neocons prosecuted for their willful negligence to the Iraqi people.

[dammit905]

3. He was a pretty bad dude...

There are many, many other rulers just as bad, though... He didn't particularly stand out.

[Ducks In A Row]

4. On scales of 10 to 1, Saddam is lower than many

but Rove has a way of making Dems afraid to say otherwise.

[cheezus]

5. oh, he's bad alright

he was the brutal dictator of Iraq until he was killed by a pack of wild boars at which point he went to hell and became involved in a homosexual relationship with the prince of darkness, Satan. Satan and Saddam almost conquered the world, but Saddam pissed Satan off so much that Satan killed him. But, where was he going to go, Detroit? Upon returning to Hell, Saddam repeatedly murdered Satan's new sissy gay lover until Satan had Saddam sent to heaven to live with the mormons as a punishment. At this point, in heave, Saddam is building a chemical weapons plant that will have the power to destroy the earth (or at least provide lots of cookies).

yep, pure evil

[BurtWorm]

6. You want to settle it? Why not toss a coin?

You'll get just as reliable and definitive an answer. :shrug:

[Nederland]

7. Question

I don't doubt that Saddam wasn't as bad as say, Pohl Pot, Stalin, or Mao. However, what living dictator would you compare him to?

[amber dog democrat]

18. Idi Amin

maybe.

[Nederland]

20. Idi Amin is currently not in power

I should have been more specific.

[amber dog democrat]

21. Maybe Kim Il Jung

or Robret Mugabi

[Nederland]

22. Have to agree with you there... (nt)

[SoCalDem]

8. Saddam was "our" guy for years.. he just outlived his usefulness

We were perfectly happy to fund him in our "proxy-war with Iran as "payback" for the hostage taking..

He ruled with a wink and a nod from us for YEARS.. Poppy was feeling kind of "wimpish" and needed a "he-man" warrior personna for his election, so the GW1 was the "recipe"..

Saddam was a gangster, and we knew it when we put him in there, so we can harddly blame him for not being "nice"..

Given a choice, I think the Iraqi people would welcome him back ...compared to what they have now.. At least with HIM, they knew what to expect.. If they kept a low profile and did not piss him off, they had food, shelter, jobs, and peace & quiet..

[Not Me]

9. Personally, an AK47 on the street is a bigger threat to me than Saddam was

n/t

[amber dog democrat]

25. I'd be more worried about a cheaper

and more disposable gun on the street.

That or a sawed off shotgun.

but I agree about Sadam. Maybe we can re habilitate him, clean him up and put him in charge of a NEW Iraq.

[mopinko]

11. what is the purpose of this thread?

it smells if you ask me.

[manic expression]

15. The purpose:

is to really have a discussion about how "horrible" a ruler Saddam was, because it seems that this opinion is the only reason which Bush can now claim to have invaded Iraq for.

[mopinko]

16. or

is it to get dems to say on the record that "saddam is not so bad", so we can be painted as soft on genocide, or whatever.
sorry, i see no reason for this discussion.

[GodHelpUsAll2]

24. Then

Don't discuss it

[maxsolomon]

12. ABOUT AS BAD AS PINOCHET

WHY ARE WE RANKING TOTALITARIANS?

[movonne]

13. I have a feeling that if the Iraq's really wanted a new leader it

would have happened..Look how they are fighting us...Don't you think that they could do this to Saddam..I could be wrong, just a thought.

[liontamer]

14. Well he wasn't the greatest leader in history

But I don't think he'd stand out over the ages. Even among contemporary leaders, he's sadly about average.

[amber dog democrat]

19. I am thinking he's be like Nickolai Calceskcu

of Albania. Just another 2-bit thug.

[Taxloss]

33. Nikolau Ceaucescu was Romania

I think you're thinking Enver Hoxha.

[amber dog democrat]

34. Thanks correct

But who was the fascist Romanian during WW II ? That was a bad one too.

[sweetheart]

44. ceaucescu was a baddie, make no mistake

This is a guy who makes 70,000 people homeless by demolishing their
homes to make a palace for himself in bucharest.

Ceaucescu is loved by reagan as being a crossover in the communist
eastern block... but on absolute measures, he was a fucking asshole
and deserved to die horribly. They finally shot him, with no fanfare
and dumped his body in a field.

Strangely i know this, by having a drink with an army recruit who
came upon his body in that field. This person told me this story.
I asked: "what did you do." "We left him there." "Everybody
hated him, better he has no grave to even remember."

Its always fun to compare nutters, but with bush, we've got a real
first class cracker on our hands... it really defies comparison.
Only when he's dead himself in a field... we can all walk by his
body and breathe a sigh of relief that he has killed his last 10,000
civilians.

[ComerPerro]

23. He was a bad guy who was supported and backed by Reagan and Bush I

He was always a terrible person.

Its just that reich wingers didn't seem to care until Bush was ready to take him out. But they had no problem with his "gassing his own people" when he was doing most of it as our ally...

[geek tragedy]

26. A psychopathic monster.

That he doesn't stand out more says more about the miserable state of world affairs than anything.

A perfect ally for the Reagan administration.

[MrSlayer]

27. Saddam was not a nice guy.

But there are people far worse than him in the world, Chimp's puppetmasters for instance.

[sweetheart]

28. Whats the matter with Chinghis Khan?

As the mongolians did not have written language whilst Chinghis and
Kublia Khan were emperors, the history was written by the conquored
with all the love, that the defeated has for the victor.

History turns out, that Ghenghis khan ran the first multi-religious
empire in history, with many of the mass murders and other stuff
turn out to be much heresay. I'm sure Ghenghis was much more
honourable than Saddam or Bush or Musharraff or Mugabe or kimjongil
or whatever..

[amber dog democrat]

36. My understanding is they very nealy wiped out both Islamic and

European nations - the only thing that stopped the Mongols was the death of Ghengis. But it can be argued the Mongols did not do much to allow or encouage progressive developemts in any of the places that the over ran.

Maybe you are thinking of the Otomans as regarding religious tolerance.

I have a sense that the Mongols were all about levying taxes and tribute.

[sweetheart]

37. historical accounts vary

I've read several books on "the one" = chinghis "king" = khan. All
of them debunk the myth of his being a horrible war criminal, as
he was but a commander, and of an age without mass media that made
megalomania harder to project across a continent.

Though he was a successful conquorer, like alexander the great, he
is remembered differently. My reading puts him on an equal par with
the likes of alexander, even better, as by his military attributes,
he was a far more successful commander.

There was one infamous incident regarding bagdhad, where they were
poorly advised diplomatically on killing an entire mongolian
diplomatic caravan to make alliances. So then no stone was left
standing in bagdhad... that was war, in a time where respect was
treated like republicans put it today.

If indeed, they sought to follow in that shadow, as brutal as it
seems, they should have nuked bagdhad. Then they would be remembered
as the army that took no shit. Instead, they are the cowards who
failed just like the british decades earlier.

Mongolia incorporated buddhism, islam of the turks, the chinese
taoism and ancestor system, and emerging christianity. It was
multireligious. Just all accounts give the caveat that no written
accounts remain, and they are all translated from heresay or from the
diaries of the conquored. One bit about temunjin(ghenghis)'s life
as a child rings quite profound amongst the written works.

In the spirit of questioning "facts". I still dispute this
unconditional fact that "ghenghis" was an evil conquorer. He was
no less evil than alexander the great or bush the coked up AWOL.

[amber dog democrat]

40. You have read more about him than I - I am going to defer

There is not question that their military tactics were far, far superior to anything they came up against. I understand Rommel and Patton both studied Kublai's manouvers.

I agree about Bagdad. If the Caliph had the sense to capitulate and act in good faith he would not have died so horribly and Bagdad would not have been destroyed.

Was that the same thing for Kiev as well ? I believe the Russian prince in charge also put the messengers to death as well. Not too smart a thing to do.

I would not class bush even in the same species or galaxy with Ghengis.

There was supposedly a quote of a a message the Mangku Khan sent to King Louis the XI th of France in 1254

that went something like " Send us your ambassadors and thus we shall judge whether you wish to be at peace with us or at war... if you make war on us the Everlasting God, who makes easy what was difficult and near what was far, knows that we know what our power is "

Could you evan imagine this being stammered in Chimp-speak ?

[They_LIHOP]

29. Your average authoritarian dictator...

Doing what authoritarian dictators do.

Sure, much of it is very distateful, esp. to our American sensibilities, but Saddam was/is by NO MEANS the worst of worst if you look at world history, not even by modern standards.

The worst things he engaged in, to my knowledge, are:
1) Wars to expand his territory under the thinnest of national security guises (now THERE'S something UNIQUELY horrifying!)...
2) Brutal repression of Political Dissenters, incl. torturing and killing them (probably 3/4 of the countries in the world have had at least one leader at some point that did this sort of thing, and MANY MANY MANY still do)...
3) Use of Chemical Weapons on his enemies without regard for collateral civilian casualties, even amongst people that were ostensibly "Iraqis". In other words, war crimes.

In this last case, the Kurds, the primary civilian victims of these weapons, were no more Saddam's 'people' than the Palestinians are Sharon's 'people'. Once again, in their faux-outrage against Saddam some 16 years later, the GOP are shown to be partisan hypocrites when they holler about the horrors of 'gassing one's own people'. Fact is, their HEROES the Reagan admin actually VETOED sanctions against their boy in Iraq for that very act. Try googling "Claiborne Pell Iraq" sometime. The sanctions were sponsored by Congressional Dems, including Al Gore, and passed by a landslide. Ray-gun shot it down, and CHENEY led the charge in Congress to uphold the veto!!!)...

The ideas that your average Faux denizens have:
That Saddam was somehow the 'baddest of the bad', that he slaughtered 'millions' of innocent civilians and dumped their bodies in 'mass graves', or otherwise engaged in a program of Genocide, that he ordered people tortured just for the sheer joy of it, that he was an avid supporter of Fundamentalist terrorism, etc, are nothing but bush administration propaganda. These charges have no basis in any actual EVIDENCE - not that I've ever heard of, anyway ...

So, all told, yes, he's a bad, bad man. But he's really no different from any other authoritarian dictator. In our history, the USA has certainly had no problem dealing w/ LOTS of others, many of them FAR worse than SH, provided they 'play ball' with our multi-nationals.

The sad fact is, by Reagan/Bush I administrations, much of Saddam's evil was blessed, and sometimes even aided. Of course, the freeptards of the world will refuse to admit the culpability of their heroes, but history is clear: as long as Saddam was killing Iranians, the rethugs in the Raygun/Bush branch of the government (which included Dick Cheney and others now in power in Bush II's admin) wouldn't say word one about how any of it, nor admit to the public how evil their proxy warrior really was.

Saddam's fate was sealed when he challenged the hegemony of the US dollar by beginning to sell Iraq's oil in Euro's. As much as the neo-cons had a long-standing dream to take over Iraq's oil supply as step one in taking over ALL the oil of the middle east, the Caspian Region, and any other easy targets , had he NOT made that move, this latest war probably never would have happened...

LICK Dick/Bush IN '04!!!

[walldude]

30. Well he was not a good guy thats for sure

but the question is why did we support him in the past. This whole thing is bullshit. Saddam was in power to keep the Iraqi Shiites and the Iranian Shiites from forming an alliance. They needed a brutal dictator in there to keep the majority of people down. If we really gave a shit about other nations we would be in Sudan right now.

[agincourt]

31. He was evil,

but by the time we invaded he was a ghost of evil, writing books. That's why we're not so welcome over there.

[Taxloss]

32. Saddam was major league evil, but ...

... he was at his very worst when he was a US ally.

I thought what we have today would be the result of his toppling, which is why I opposed him - yes, Saddam was pretty much the worst dictator in the world, but what we have now is worse: the possibility of a civil war in Iraq and a regional war in the Middle East. Those outcomes will - and they have been set in motion now - kill, maim and torture far more people than Saddam ever did, and in a quarter of the time.

This is the critical thing with evil dictators: you can't afford to pander to them, ever. Burma is evil, but it's lost thanks to pandering. Uzebekistan, Turkmenistan and Libya are being pandered to. Libya we know is an evil terrorist nation, yet Britain is selling it arms. Why? We pandered to Iraq, and look what happened.

Because the Iraq war had nothing to do with terrorism (apart from encouraging it) and a lot to do with Bush.

Blair and Bush have no interest in human rights. Why Blair went along with this whole charade is still a mystery to me. We are funding and arming, right now, the Saddams of the future.

[DrWeird]

35. Well, he did take babies out of incubators.

And he did have WMDs.

And he did order US troops to torture people at Abu Ghraib.

[amber dog democrat]

41. How many more monsters

has the US created by its occupation.

By the way, you do know the incubators story was not true ?

[orpupilofnature57]

38. UNCHECKED POWER

SADDAM MAKES GEORGIE PORGIE LOOK LIKE A LIBERAL,HOW BAD IS THAT?

[amber dog democrat]

39. Sadam and George are two sides of the same coin

Murderers all. But unlike the privilledged frat boy/ serial killer, Sadam is not so great a hypocrate

[Capn Sunshine]

42. Problem with brutal dictators

they are really good in supressing dissent. The stability in a brutal dictatorship is hard to duplicate without one.
Too bad the shitforbrains gang in the White House forgot this tiny detail.

Wait, maybe they didn't forget. Maybe instability and controlled chaos is the desired effect to divert attention from the BILLIONS BEING STOLEN thus far.


NAaaaaaaa

[Cat Atomic]

43. He WAS a monster.

And alot of decent Americans were making that point even while Reagan was giving him weapons.

[mmonk]

45. He was horrible

and also no threat to the United States. He was a harrasser of Israel though.