Yes, I Would Still Have Ousted Saddam from Power [Knowing What We Know Now]

National Review ^ | 05/13/2015 | Quin Hillyer

[combat_boots]

We have to concede that the contrast of these situations could not be more stark:

Not good: Saddam and no nukes or WMDs (not true-sent to Syria, another Baathist regime, along with what exists in Iraq now and was suppressed by Rove(?))

Good: Iran and nuclear ambitions, potentially already having nuclear weapons they developed or got from N Korea

[silverleaf]

the mission was to set up a western-style democratic republic using scholars from Iraq and America to build from the ground up using our Constitutional framework. Remember that?

Root out and destroy the WMD every intelligence service in the world said was there

to build a western trained military where officers were trained to be under civilian control and respect civilians (a rarity in the world much less arab world

to rebuild the economy to provide for daily comforts for the common people (water, sewers, electricity, phone service, health system, schools) and allow for development of capitalism to give hope to a rising middle class and reduce the hopelessness and poverty used by the imams to radicalize the young

the noble idea was to get rid of a hellhole of tyrannical hopelessness that was only going to breed generations of envy hate and resentment of the west - root causes of terrorism that led to 911

and oh yeah, keep a 2 front strategic battle going to keep them fighting our military over there, not coming after our civilians here- like they are now

yeah, that Bush, what a fool to come up with such a plan.

The alternative solution you would propose to end terrorism roots?

Keep troops abroad for generations?

Stay home and try to stop them at our borders (where we are now, but we are not guarding borders, we are trying to guard every US domestic military base, school, aircraft, railway station, mall etc etc etc- because now they are here inside America, not on a battleground in Iraq and Afghanistan)

Kill everyone?

How DO you end the cycle of arab/muslim hatred and attacks against western civilization?

[stylin19a]

nobody talks about it, but taking out Saddam required that his 2 sons also be taken out.

regardless, something had to give with Saddam eventually. He was making a mockery of “Food for Oil”, “No Fly Zones” etc...

[Lorianne]

So the plan was to make non-Western people western, with western values and institutions.

Brilliant. I can see how that can work /s

[silverleaf]

yeah, imagine how dumb it would have been to try that with Japan in 1945

[Lorianne]

So you would have our military run around the world making everyone mini-Americans?

First of all, how much is that going to cost? Secondly, why the hell is it our business to make everyone on the planet just like us (whether they want to be or not)?

[silverleaf]

oh no, I’m sure our military would prefer to cower here at home on our bases in our communities waiting for terrorists to storm the gates, attack our community schools, malls, churches, synagogues, urban streets, tunnels, bridges, power grid, airports and airliners and other American targets on our soil. Then we can teach them a lesson!

Taking the fight to the enemy to battlefields of our choosing the time and place is just too expensive, after all. Lets just hunker down here, shine our boots, and wait

And thanks for reminding us it really is stupid to think that people of other cultures want the mini-American values of liberty mercy and freedom from fear of being tortured and murdered en masse while the free world watches and waits in line hoping to not be next.

BTW, you didn’t come up with an alternative to what Bush attempted.

C’mon genius, put on your thinking cap and give us a better strategy

[Billthedrill]

The premise of this question is nearly always false: that GWB made the decision in some sort of tabula rasa situation with nothing else going on around it to influence him. He was handed the festering butt end of a ten-year-old shooting war in a time of considerable international destabilization. No decision-maker is ever accorded the privilege of "knowing what we know now," and it is grotesquely distorting to attempt to judge him or her on the basis of a decade and a half's hindsight. It's a stupid mind game played for no other purpose than to advance the speaker's sense of superiority.

There was no "good" course of action available, not even inaction. Action leads to the presumption that he could have foreseen the actions of his successors. Inaction leads to the sort of "why didn't we stop Hitler before" questions that are equally futile. Given what he knew when he knew it he made the decision he did. That is all that has any basis of fact behind it.

[Lorianne]

Wait, fighting terrorists is the same thing as making everyone into mini-Americans?

We are 319 million out of 7 Billion people on the planet. We can lead by example but we cannot go re-make everyone else’s culture. It’s just not feasible on any level imaginable, even if it were something that should be done, which of course it is not.

We had better think long and hard about those numbers. We can be strong and protect ourselves against long odds (like Israel does) but that doesn’t mean we can go around the globe changing everyone’s culture and values by force.

[wiley]

“and oh yeah, keep a 2 front strategic battle going to keep them fighting our military over there, not coming after our civilians here- like they are now”

To me this was and is the first and most important reason for the war.