How should we treat hostage situations?

[Sonart]

Falling all over himself to defend the Saudis? Is that why we removed all our troops?

Removing all troops IS about defending Saudi Arabi. That was one of Paul Wolfowitz' stated reasons for invading Iraq, to remove the threat to the Persian Gulf so that we could remove our troops so that Arab anger against the Saudi regime for garrisoning American troops on holy Saudi soil might be reduced. Unfortunately, pressure on the Saudi government has only increased, and not from Iraq.

What? Democracy was never created by foreign aggression? Japan isn't a democracy? Or Germany? South Korea stopped being a democracy?

I'm not sure how many times this little fairy tale is going to be bantered around. We weren't the aggressors, Japan and Germany were, in a clear, brutal military bid to conquer the entire world. We didn't attack them, we counter-attacked and stopped them, pushed them out of the lands they had conquered, destroyed their capacity to make war, surrounded them with the contries they had formerly conquered and jointly (at least in Germany) occupied them to make sure they were no longer a threat.

In a few words, we had no choice but to stop them. Iraq, on the other hand, had attacked no one, had been reduced to the exact opposite of a conquering superpower and was no threat.