Tell me how any of the shit that is going on right now in the Middle East happens without George W. Bush and Dick Cheney's brilliantly fucked up idea to invade Iraq? Originally Posted by timpageSo Timmytard, let's turn the question around. Why don't you tell us how Iraq would look today if we had never invaded? Here is a reminder for willfully blind liberals of where things were going prior to our invasion:
Christopher Hitchens, April 2, 2004:
"A few more years of Saddam Hussein, or perhaps the succession of his charming sons Uday and Qusay, and whole swathes of Iraq would have looked like Fallujah. The Baathists, by playing off tribe against tribe, Arab against Kurd and Sunni against Shiite, were preparing the conditions for a Hobbesian state of affairs. Their looting and beggaring of the state and the society—something about which we now possess even more painfully exact information—was having the same effect. A broken and maimed and traumatized Iraq was in our future no matter what.
Obviously, this prospect could never have been faced with equanimity. Iraq is a regional keystone state with vast resources and many common borders. Its implosion would have created a black hole, sucking in rival and neighboring powers, tempting them with opportunist interventions and encouraging them to find ethnic and confessional proxies. And who knows what the death-throes of the regime would have been like? We are entitled, on past experience, to guess. There could have been deliberate conflagrations started in the oilfields. There might have been suicidal lunges into adjacent countries. The place would certainly have become a playground for every kind of nihilist and fundamentalist. The intellectual and professional classes, already gravely attenuated, would have been liquidated entirely.
All of this was, only just, averted. And it would be a Pangloss who said that the dangers have receded even now. But at least the international intervention came before the whole evil script of Saddam's crime family had been allowed to play out. A subsequent international intervention would have been too little and too late, and we would now be holding an inquest into who let this happen—who in other words permitted in Iraq what Bill Clinton and Madeleine Albright and Kofi Annan permitted in Rwanda, encouraged by the Elysee....
I hope I do not misrepresent my opponents, but their general view seems to be that Iraq was an elective target; a country that would not otherwise have been troubling our sleep. This ahistorical opinion makes it appear that Saddam Hussein was a new enemy, somehow chosen by shady elements within the Bush administration, instead of one of the longest-standing foes with which the United States, and indeed the international community, was faced."
And here is something else you overlook:
Prior to the 2003 invasion, it was the conventional wisdom of our foreign policy elite that Bush the Elder's biggest blunder was allowing Saddam to stay in power after the success of Desert Storm in 1991. By 1998, Congress passed the Iraq Liberation Act declaring "it should be the policy of the United States to seek to remove the Saddam Hussein regime from power in Iraq and replace it with a democratic government." This legislation was endorsed UNANIMOUSLY by Senate Democrats and signed into law by then-President Bill Clinton.
Have you forgotten, timmytard, how for 12 long years prior to our 2003 invasion of Iraq, we were spending billions each year enforcing a no-fly zone? Our sorties were being shot at on a daily basis. UN sanctions were a joke. Their evasion was breeding rampant corruption at the highest levels. Even UN Secy-Gen. Kofi Annan's son was lining his pockets. How long do you think we should have shrugged and continued to tolerate all of this, timmytard?
I had my own misgivings about the Iraq war and the way it was conducted. But I have no patience for the specious arguments of the professional Bush/Cheney haters like you, timmytard. The same people who insisted that we bomb Belgrade in 1998 to stop genocide in Kosovo turned a blind eye to Saddam's genocide, even after we went in and uncovered numerous mass graves. BOTH wars could be justified on humanitarian grounds. The big difference? Bush/Cheney wars are BAD, while Clinton or Obama wars (Libya) are GOOD. This kind of thinking is appalling and dangerous in today's world. Our foreign policy needs to be guided by national interest, not partisan talking points, timmytard.
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