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Quote by: rmnunez  I don't think there was a reasonable solution to the problem of Saddam's rule in Iraq posed. Regime change was necessary and could not be reasonably achieved by other means.
Saddam was an adversary who was not amenable to persuasion and capable of resisting lots of pressure thanks to oil affluence. He corrupted and bribed his way through the Oil for Food programme and the import restrictions, was able to skirt the sanctions and smuggled across Syria.
Diplomatic pressure didn't seem to have much effect either as Saddam flouted recurring UN resolutions with impunity. The Europeans and Russia tried to encourage his cooperation to no avail either.
Finally he was not very responsive to the threat of force as despite having his airspace closed off, harbours closed with a de-facto naval blockade and tens of thousands of troops massed at his borders and daily increased with new deployments -wouldn't yield or concede anything to facilitate the UN's inspections.
What possible alternative (reasonable or not) do you think would have made Saddam more cooperative? |
It was not necessary to make Sadam more cooperative, it was necessary to insure he was not a true threat. We could have kept up in much the same way in Iraq, secured Afganistan more effectively and helped to create a real bastion of democracy in the region, all with the support and good-will of the world community. Once we had fought the real war against terror, we could have kept up a real coalition of the truely willing and used the power of our still present moral standing in the world to promote a Middle East peace plan that would have showed the average Arab citizen (who really only wants some kind of secure life and an expectation of future success) that the western world is not opposed to that happening. All of our policies in the middle east are focused on securing our power and control. Just as there is a small radical branch of western idiots who believe that only the white man matters and it is a sell out to take any action that does not secure white dominance, there is a small radical branch of Islamic idiots who believe that the world will not be right until it has been returned to the state of being that existed when Mohhamed walked the earth. The way you defeat them is to marginalize them. You make life agreeable to the majority so that their idiotic rantings seem just what they are. And just like the KKK and the militia morons in the US will never completely go away, they get less support when the world around them does not lend creadence to their stupid ideals. If you are shooting at them every chance you get, they get to wag their fingers and scream from the mountains "Oppression!"
And in case you haven't seen it before, I will say it again. I lived in the DC area on 9/11. I worked 3 blocks from the Pentagon. I personally knew someone who died on the plane that hit the pentagon. I do not claim that I was great friends with this person. I was a friend of his daughter and knew him from cook-outs and such. My point is, I do not in anyway not know what that day meant. I have not forgotten or any such nonsense. But here is a truth that can not be ignored. Our actions have taken many more innocent lives in Iraq than we lost on 9/11. The people who have lost childen, wives, mothers, fathers, husbands, brothers and sisters in Iraq where not responsible for 9/11 and we are breeding more hate. You would not care either (if it was one of your family) that we TRY not to kill innocents. Those people are just as innocent and just as dead as any American. We feed the monster when we do stupid shit like that. All your backward reasoning and attemps at justification do not change that simple fact. We are now feeding the monster, not killing it. Just about any answer would have been better. We are weaker, they are stronger. Is Bin Laden weaker? Yes, but he does not care. He cares that millions more despise us now. Can HE attack us with the same effect? No, but he does not care. He cares that millions of more brains are being applied to finding ways to attack us and thousands of more cells with the same ideology are being spawned. It was a stupid, short sighted solution. It will cost us if we do not stop it. It has already cost us, just not in civilian blood, yet.