Apparently they hung him. He richly deserved to die, and die richly he did — Craig at R&F suggests it cost about $354 billion to bring him to justice (less the occasional “Mission Accomplished” banner and fake turkey.)
Anyway, I hope the questions asked in the wake of Hussein’s execution are not of the “is it good that he is dead” variety, but rather of the “was the cost worth the benefit” variety. I suggest that we paid (and will continue to pay for a generation or two since we’ve borrowed the cost of this adventure) far too much. Hussein and Iraq didn’t pose much of a threat to the U.S. He didn’t promote the sort of radical religion that motivates the likes of bin Laden — that sort of religious belief would have been a threat to his secular power which is all a tyrant like Hussein was interested in. So, we have paid hundreds of billions, lost several thousand soldiers, and destabilized Iraq (opening it up to the kind of religious agitators who do pose a threat) in exchange for removing and killing a dictator we didn’t like but ultimately couldn’t do much to harm us. Nice trade.
We were for Saddam before we were against him.
Flip-flop.
No war is worth the price. I refuse to believe that the only way to solve a problem is with bloodshed. Waging war is the last refuge of the incompetent or the impatient.
It is amazing and disturbing to me that a species so capable of nurturing and invention, is also so capable at killing itself.
Sometimes the selective memory of this country absolutely astounds me. Does anybody remember the entire world thought this moron had weapons of mass destruction and his track record with the Kurds showed he had no problem using them?
Hindsight is always 20-20, but in the heat of the moment, this nation and the entire world were convinced he was going to blow the bejesus out someone or something.
I don’t mean to over simplify, but 4 years ago, after what we had been through, about 90% of the people in this nation were on board with the concept of pre-emptive action.
No matter what has become of our national opinion or what the polls say, we went in good faith and we must finish in good faith. To do any less would be absolutely wrong.
There was no “heat of the moment” involved. The weapons of mass destruction many thought there was a possibility he might have were from the 80s. And here, we’re just talking about biological weapons. The nuclear program was all hype. (Remember Bush’s “yellowcake” lie in the State of the Union? Or how about Condi’s fabrication about the aluminum tubes having no other possible use other than a nuclear program?) There was no urgency to the Iraq war, otherwise, why would Andy Card have waited until September to start beating the drums of war, noting that one simply does not roll out a new product before Labor Day.
The only reason the Bush administration needed to go in rapidly was for fear that the political will to go to war would fade. Other than that, there was no significant danger to the United States that prevented allowing the inspections to continue. The Downing Street memos confirm that the Bush administration had no intention of allowing inspections to succeed. They were intent on shaping the intelligence around the policy of going to war with Iraq. Which makes sense when you consider that many influential members of the Bush administration were members of PNAC which was agitating for war with Iraq back in 1998 and Rumsfeld’s desire to pin 9/11 on Iraq within hours of the attack.
Doug, as I noted, hindsight is always 20/20. I think you could make a case against virtually any action the U.S. has ever taken, if you have a strong enough desire, a ton of innuendo and 4 or 5 years to do it.
As an attorney, would you present anything you cited in your post as evidence in court? None of it is fact, the majority of it 2nd or 3rd hand knowledge and anonymous uncoroborrated sources channeled through the media.
I realize conspiracy theories have become an American tradition, but when the smoke clears, there just aren’t any facts backing up the theories, or I suspect there would be a hell of a lot more people in court than Scooter.
Hey, I’m all in favor of deposing Bush, Cheney, & Co. and forcing them to disgorge all of their communications and documents on the subject so we can have some direct evidence for a trial. But that’s not going to happen, so we’ll have to rely on the evidence we have. Everything I’ve cited above is fairly solid. Card did make the remark about rolling out a product line in September. Rice did assert that the aluminum tubes couldn’t be used for anything else. Many of the decision makers in the Bush administration were part of PNAC. I don’t know enough about the Downing Street Memo to go out on a limb about its reliability.
I think it’s fairly clear that many influential members of the Bush administration were spoiling for war with Iraq for quite some time. 9/11 gave them their opportunity to make it happen. Had we had similar weapons intelligence about a country other than Iraq, we wouldn’t have invaded.
Hindsight, bah. We had inspectors on the ground in the six months prior to the war. They were going to every site where our “intelligence” (actually, mostly single-sourced hearsay from people who wanted to overthrow the government at best, Iranian agents at worst) said the WMD were, and there was nothing. Nor was there even trace evidence that anything had been there. In one inspector’s words, the U.S. intelligence was “shit”. So dumbass Bush’s reasoned response was to pull the inspectors, and invade as punishment for Saddam not surrendering weapons he didn’t have. What a bunch of rot. If the inspectors hadn’t been there, you could say hindsight is 20/20, etc. But we had inspectors on the ground. We had to invade before the concept of “inspectors are finding nothing” sank in, or maybe before that Darryl Worley song left the charts. People tend to forget that when forgiving this administration for their 600,000+ death, $trillion piece of crap war. Heck, even Bush forgets it, as he has been quoted since the war as saying we had to invade because Saddam wouldn’t let the inspectors in. And our retarded sheeple played along. Some still do.
But why not step back further? Some of these chemical weapons attacks we blamed on Saddam (and he almost certainly did), we earlier blamed on Iran when Saddam was our ally. We played a hell of a game over there. The Shah was overthrown, we were pissed, so we armed Saddam and encouraged him to wage war against Iran. Then, when Saddam had the upper hand, Ollie, Ronnie, and George decided to sell weapons to Saddam’s enemy Iran, in part to curry favor with the people holding hostages in Beirut (who we don’t negotiate with, wink wink), in part to I guess maximize the number of brown people killed in the Middle East–I mean insure no one country was allowed to dominate the region, and mainly to get some money to kill some brown people in Nicaragua. Needless to say, Saddam felt a bit duped. The war was prolonged by years, his casualties went up thanks to us arming his enemy, and his debt skyrocketed also. Leading to an oil grab in Kuwait and the rest is history. Yeah, Saddam was a bad guy. But how many people are dead over there due to U.S. involvement in the region? Hundreds of thousands in this war alone. Add up our double-dealing in the Iran-Iraq War and the body count is in the few millions. Yeah, Saddam was a bad guy. Just bad enough to hold onto power in that pit. And smart enough to be our useful idiot when it served our foreign policy goals. But not smart enough to sit down and shut up when he stopped being “our guy”.
Well, I’m not sure who the other “10%” of people who didn’t want to go to war with Iraq were, but I sure as hell know a LOT of them. We had a number of discussions about it at work, before the whole adventure started and while we all saw a lot of rhetoric being spewed by the Administration – none of us really saw anything that said we needed to take immediate action. Most of the World didn’t either, which is why the “coalition of the willing” didn’t include a helluva lot of other forces.
Regardless of Saddam’s intentions and possible capabilities at the time, there were still a LOT of options that could have been exhausted before war was undertaken. The simple fact is, the Bush administration was not going to take “we didn’t find any weapons” for an answer from the U.N. Weapons Inspection Teams. We were on the road to war long before it all came to a head, and I’m one of those who think that we were on a road to war the minute that Bush “won” the 2000 election.
I’m pleased with the Democrats coming around to finally question Iraq in earnest over the last several months, but I hope they take their inquiry much further than to call it a ‘Republican mistake’. Fact is, no matter which Administration you would care to site post WW2, Republican or Democrat, it engaged in a war that destabilized a country, deposed a regime, and generally made an expensive mess.
If only I could believe that at long last the left and the Democrats have given up their stake in the USA playing the world’s cop, being generally interventionist only in different places. Will we be meddling in Durfur next? Back to Somalia perhaps? What’s the real difference between these and Iraq? The premises would be the same- that the USA should be intervening. I’ve heard very little in the way of the left calling for a change in our role, only the logistics. This makes me sad.
Hey guys, nice comeback to tim zank’s neoConned ideological nonsense. It’s hard to believe that there are so many out there that think like this box of rocks. It was this kind of thinking that got us distracted from Osama and the war on terrorism and into the invasion/occupation of Iraq(by the way that’s exactly what it is.By definition not a war. A very important distinction that a lot of people are forgetting,perhaps intentionally)