I'm not sure whether to laugh or cry. Are you serious?
Look, I don't care who owes who what in the most basic sense of asset exchange, but to ask THEM to "pay us back" for any of... this whole thing... looks apallingly bad, certainly.
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SOFA Passes in Iraq
- Thread starter Flash
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I'm not sure whether to laugh or cry. Are you serious?
Look, I don't care who owes who what in the most basic sense of asset exchange, but to ask THEM to "pay us back" for any of... this whole thing... looks apallingly bad, certainly.
Clux4
Banned
Are you kidding me. Who cares how it looks, ain't no FREE lunch. Would you say NO if you got the money?
Ask Kuwaiti's how much they paid after Desert Storm.
Let them pay 35% of the cost. That is still something.
I might be shaky on the history, but I'm pretty sure the Kuwaitis asked us to help them out. Iraqis? not so much.
That money needs to stay in Iraq and, hopefully, go back into rebuilding all the shit we knocked down. We've paid a lot for it already, they can pick up the tab for the rest of their nation's rebuilding, but they don't owe us a cent.
Reparations to the victors? yea, that worked out really well in 1918.
The question is, was it worth it? I'm not sure I know the answer, nor would I begin to know how to put a pricetag on something like that, but the cost in lives (coalition and civilian) and our own national treasure has been pretty fucking immense. Not to mention the political ramifications of international scorn, and the toll which Republicans paid in the loss of White House and the Congress. Of course, this is hypothetical to an extent, but you can't argue that the war was good for Republicans from a political standpoint. The administration had some pretty lofty goals that, in hindsight, had almost zero chance of being realized. Was one petty dictator (among dozens of others in the region) really worth all the trouble?
Brett
Consider the number of Iraqis that Saddam would have killed on his own had he stayed in power.
There is no doubt that Saddam deserved to be dethroned..but why start with him? Do we have the resources to go oust every dictator out there?
Saddam was crazy, but there was no Al Queda in the country (in fact Al Queda was no friend of Saddam)...the trains were still on time, the water was running. Saddam was aging and could have very well just faded off like Castro.
The situation has improved recently, no doubt. However, under Saddam there were no car bombs exploding out side of police stations killing 120 a pop.
By the logic you stated, what's next? Darfur? Africa? North Korea? They kill a lot of their own people.
Why start with Saddam? Because of 9/11, and the potential for terrorists to acquire more destructive weapons. The need to "change the equation" in the Mid East.
No, there were no car bombs exploding. Just people being grabbed in the middle of the night by the secret police, women being picked for rape. Look into the mass graves that have been found. Read about the Marsh Arabs and the Kurds. Saving future Saddam victims was not a main reason in and of itself for the war, but when someone mentions Iraqi lives that were lost, those should be measured against the lives that were saved.
Wow, hindsight sure is 20/20 eh?
Of course, at the time we thought he had "weapons of mass destruction" and so did the rest of the world. UN Resolution 1441 was passed unanimously.
Our Congress voted for the Authorization for Use of Force in Iraq
This authorization answers your question of "Why Saddam and not any of the others?"
I'm not saying right or wrong, just that this is the reason we went there in the first place.
Of course, at the time we thought he had "weapons of mass destruction" and so did the rest of the world. UN Resolution 1441 was passed unanimously.
Our Congress voted for the Authorization for Use of Force in Iraq
This authorization answers your question of "Why Saddam and not any of the others?"
I'm not saying right or wrong, just that this is the reason we went there in the first place.
I suspect that we would have gone in with or without the UN resolution, but, for what it's worth, that did provide international legitimacy. That is generally ignored by the critics of Pres Bush, however.
But we can't now ignore hindsight in analysing the decision-making process that led to initiating the war. Hindsight tells us that the judgment of those who were in posession of the facts (as they understood them), may not have been up to the standards which we expect of our national leaders. I think that it has been pretty well established that there was a lot of wishful thinking and "liberal" interpretation of raw intelligence data and that, for whatever reasons, the decision to go to war was made first, then a case was cobbled together to justify that decision. That's backwards in my book.
Brett
Clux4
Banned
I would never have expected this from you.
What happened? Did I mistake you for Bevo !!
I would never have expected this from you.
What happened? Did I mistake you for Bevo !!
At least Bevo can make a point that makes sense.
Brett