Cool Dood said:
Good lord, does this mean what I think it means? I haven't follwed the whole conversation closely, but if looks aren't deceiving, that's one messed up sentence!
Sure, I wrote it on sub-one-coffee-brain. Same as this. So my apologies in advance. And wow, are we off the beaten topic...
I'm going to deconstruct this a little bit, in part to explain the sentence you quoted and in part to provide some opinion that I think is pretty well backed up by at least strong anecdotal evidence if not actual fact...not that the lack of the latter stops us.
- Hussein takes power in a country where its almost impossible to impose a firm government on the collection of yahoos and religious nuts. His strong arm tactics prove effective. We're now learning that roses and chocolate do not keep the radical elements in line. Oh yeah, and half the population are radical elements.
- Up to the 1970's, we oppose Hussein because he's a soviet puppet and we've got our "man" the Shah set up in Iran to help keep the oil moving.
- We "lose" our man in Iran and they hold our people hostage, so we're not their pals anymore. Religious nutjobs run amok. By the way, go look up what our pal "the shah" did to his people in Iran. Real nice stuff.
- Religious nutjobs and the soviet puppet get into a couple of conflicts, and we support the puppet. He figures out we pay better than the soviets. We figure out that he's the only non religious nutjob in the region and the buffer between the islamic fundamentalists and Israel, and those other saudi arabian guys we sort of like but not because of their oil.
- Our new buddy supposedly asks the CIA if its ok if he can invade kuwait and gets a green light. After all, who gives a crap about 'kuwait'.
- All of a sudden, we care a lot about poor little kuwait and its pile of rich oil billionaires. Go back and look at the genealogy of who cared first and how they got everyone else to care. Largely friends of the rich oil billionaires from kuwait.
- We tell Saddam to back off, he's already committed, the american population has already been amped up to see this as a hostile situation with victims.
- We kick Saddams ass. But we cant take him out, because we know if we do, Iraq will fall to the same nutjobs running Iran and we'll have a near superpower sitting on the borders of Israel and SA. Cant have that. Anyone even wonder why we got all the way to Baghdad and didnt grab him or why we played that ten year "no fly zone" game? Didnt want him out, didnt want him to get a full force back, but wanted his buffered-ness and to have some of our guys in the area just in case Iran incited a border incident.
- After reducing his military to nearly nil, we incite several large groups of unhappy people, like the Kurds, to revolt. We tell them we'll help them. Then when they do revolt, we do a little "down low...too slow!" to them just like we did to the nice folks in Cuba forty years ago. Hussein, having no practical army or air force and not being particularly interested in being dead, is forced to use gas on the revolting troops (no offense to the troops). After warning them I believe three times that he was going to do it.
- Saddam goes back to doing what he always did. Rule the country with an iron fist. Basically, its "knock yourself out and try causing some trouble, I'll torture and kill your whole family and anyone that even looks like you". Crude, but effective.
- Ten years later, it becomes clear the guy isnt going to hang on much longer. He's pretending he has WMD's so his neighbors will think twice about invading. The UN institutes a corrupt oil-for-food program that provides no food while a bunch of guys get rich. We cant have a natural evolution here where Hussein dies or gets too weak to hold on and the nutjobs take over the country. Too much oil there, too much potential political instability. Its too easy to nip this in the bud and try to put "our guy" in charge and keep a US military presence around, with the other option to wait 5 years and then fight world war three in the region when the new fundamentalist crew decides to push israel into the ocean and 'convert' SA to the "true believers" they should be.
- So we paint him as a mass murderer who uses WMD's on his own people and will shortly use them on us. We fan the flames of fear and imply that he's connected with 9/11. He's Satan on earth and we've gotta stop him.
- We bomb the country, killing as many as 150,000 civilians and then proceed to a ground war and occupation, during which between 40,000 and 150,000 civilians are killed. Lotsa luck getting a correct number. The pentagon has admitted that they have a body count, and they're not going to say what it is. Which means its pretty bad.
So in summary, we've meddled in this region to suit our own interests for decades. We've put people up to suicide missions and then acted horrified at the results. We put the country of Iraq at the mercy of a corrupt united nations and then decried the starvation deaths. We then bombed the crap out of the country and turned it upside down so that we could put our own people in place who are largely devolving to the same style of "keeping the peace" as Hussein did.
Or you can go with the Fox News summary version that Hussein was a nutjob that randomly gassed and raped/murdered innocent people for no strong legitimate reason other than he was a nutjob, and we were the good guys that went in with our special bombs that dont kill innocent people (or that we expected to keep the innocent death to an "acceptably small" number, and that we'll bring a healthy, loving democracy to the country and eventually the region. Which surely tastes much better and has a happy ending.
In fact, it conjures up so much good feeling that you can forget that we're the only country on earth to have used nukes on enemy civilian targets, that we've flushed out enemies with flamethrowers, defoliants and napalm, and that not that long ago we used poison gas on our own people during the civil war and on our enemies in the world wars. It sure doesnt help that a lot of those folks were far more civilized than the ones Hussein had to deal with.
This is one of those cases where I'm proud to be an american, but knowing all the pieces of this evolution, cant feel too proud of what we've done.
So as far as the people we've killed being "more innocent", i'm betting the majority of people Hussein killed were trying to disrupt his government. The people we killed were sitting in their houses or walking down the street.
). Unfortunately I'm at work and don't really have time to get into a detailed response -- oh wait a minute, is that the rest of the board saying "thank you, we won't have to put up with that"? -- but I'll briefly comment that although I agree with much of your timeline, and a number of your conclusions, I still think the basis of it with which I was disagreeing is wrong: most of the Iraqis whom Saddam threw into his rape rooms, or executed, or even just put in jail, were normal people who had done no wrong. You may be right about some of the bad things we've done there, but that in no way excuses or changes the fact of what Saddam did wrong, which really was brutal. Never mind the disproportionate force used against people who actually did plot against him, there are mass graves full of people who were as innocent as Bambi. It's completely unfair to them, I believe, to lump them in with the handful of rebels and criminals who "got their just desserts" or whatever (again, it's not like Saddam's torture was really just), and claim that they in any way deserved what happened to them. Fer chrissakes, he burned down villages and rounded up whole families -- most of the women and children in Iraq couldn't do anything criminal, let alone whether they wanted to.![:-\](https://www.early-retirement.org/sk/forums/images/smilies/undecided.gif "Undecided :-\")
