"Would it have been better to have allowed Saddam to remain in power?"
And then ------ ?
Even if he had kept the lid on the place, what was the 'secession plan' ? More of the same from his scumbag sons, now thankfully no longer among us ? Does anyone really think that Iraq was going to 'develope' a new civic culture under his tender care ?
Iraq as we have clearly seen was not a real State. It was a family fun-park for the few and a horror hotel for the many. Even now MOST Shias say that they are glad he is gone, and ALL the Kurds would like to kill him all over again. The Sunnis in Iraq are busy making their own beds although some have lately become aware of the abyss towards which they have been madly dashing. If not for Sunni STUPIDITY, the situation would not be what it now is, and the Sunnis are the ones who will pay the most for their own miscalculations.
Iraq is merely the Mid-East in a nutshell. A cess-pool of 'seeming' stability which underneath the surface is ---- well let's be candid here--- It's ALL IRAQ. There really are no real States (as we understand that term) there .
Leaving Saddam in place would have delayed the explosion. There is no way it could ever have prevented the explosion. The Invasion merely affected the timing.
I don't feel very guilty. Upset and angry at the 'incompetence' of the occupation and the US failure to 'see' what the situation really was --- to be sure. Guilty--- not so much.
"Would it have been better to have allowed Saddam to remain in power?"
No. What would have been better would be to understand from the start that the message to send is "we don't care who rules those Middle-Eastern cesspools as long as the thug-in-charge understands that he can't screw around with the West". Non-Israeli Middle-Easterners have shown time and again that they're either incapable or unwilling to rule themselves in a manner that we would approve of. I don't know, nor care, whether this is because of culture, religion, biological makeup, whatever. Doesn't matter. They need some kind of strongman to lord over them. Fine, let them have one as long as he understands that any attempt to translate poisonous anti-Western rhetoric into actions against us will be met with immediate and deadly force.
Well said, Doug.
The Iraqis deserve the biggest say when determining whether overthrowing Saddam was the right course of action, and as Doug has pointed out, a majority wouldn't turn the clock back if they had the choice.
There are modern historical parallels to the situation in Iraq that lend some insight to the dilemma of allowing tyranny to prevail, rather than paying the often bloody price to defeat it.
At the height of the Korean War, did the South Korean people believe the enormous loss of life they were enduring was worth it, or would it have been better, in hindsight, to have rolled over at the onset of hostilities and simply allowed North Korea to take control of the entire peninsula?
The answer seems obvious now, but that wouldn't have been the case at the time. We know the American public didn't support the war as it ground down to a stalemate, a stalemate that saved tens of millions of South Koreans from the hellish prospect of life under the Kims. So much for the wisdom of American public opinion. Judging by today's polls on the subject of Iraq, not much has changed.
South Africa rid itself of Apartheid in 1994, but much like the removal of Saddam, the overthrow of the racist minority white overlords resulted in criminal anarchy and instability.
Depending on whether you accept the South African government's statistics or those of Interpol, anywhere from approximately 100,000-200,000 more South Africans have been murdered since 1994 than would have been expected to die violently had the dictatorial minority remained in power (excluding "what ifs," which would also apply in the context of Iraq, assuming Saddam had been left in power).
Would a majority of South Africans want to return to the days of Apartheid, in exchange for a less murderous day to day existence? Not a chance.
While we're on the subject of Apartheid and South Africa, it's safe to say that many who opposed regime change in Iraq were, conversely, avid supporters of it in South Africa. While these people are keen to point to the death toll in Iraq as proof that removing Saddam was wrong, has anyone heard someone of that ideological bent concede their support for regime change in South Africa was a mistake, based on the enormous violent death toll that followed?
I haven't, and I'm wondering why the distinction?
Actually, I'm not.
The hilarious thing about these wonkish foreign policy gab fests is their complete detachment from and ignorance of history and human nature. AS if pulling out of Iraq will quell jihadist recruitment. Has it not occurred to these idiots that the most virulent islamic movements seek to conquer the whole world? If it is not the US in Iraq it will be something else that gives them an excuse to kill, so let us keep killing them there. And killing and killing. If we do pull out we should do it via Tehran and Waziristan and leave a generational trail of destruction that will be talked about for a thousand years.
Posted at 2007-03-30 06:42:31 [PermaLink]The best solution would have been to partition Iraq. The country was artificially cobbled together by the Brits and it never functioned properly until Saddam ruled it with an iron fist.
I am no longer convinced that outsiders are the ones creating chaos there, which is why you don't see anything happening in the Kurdish area. This is good-old Sunni vs Shia trouble. So we can either get out and let them kill each other or physically separate them once and for all. And yes, I know that Iran and Syria have their eye on these entities but frankly, I am not sure this would make much of a difference if these entities became puppets of Iran and Syria in the future.