Posted on 10/04/2015 11:31:04 AM PDT by Mariner
Agreed.
There is no argument that the middle east is far less stable now.
But we really needed to deal with Saddam as he was funding terrorism, openly paying families of suicide terrorists, bragging about his nuclear mujadeen (and we did find a lot of yellow cake uranium), and generally an evil person. He’s the only head of state to openly applaud 9/11.
George H. should have taken out Saddam during the first Gulf War. And they should have built a wall to keep Iranian infiltrators out.
What was smart was when Bush said "we're going to kill the terrorists, and any country that hides them or helps them will be treated like them"..... now that was smart, but no one (including Bush) really has the brass to kill 2 or 3 hundred muslims to make it happen.
He’s right.
That part of the world has always been unstable more so since the dominance of islam.
OOps... ment to say 2 or 3 hundred MILLION muslims.
I disagreed with going into liberate Kuwait, why get involved in intra-Arab squabbles.
But once you go in, you do not leave the guy you just defeated in power, because he will plot his revenge.
One of the first things to go down the memory hole was Zawahiri and his band of thugs, “Egyptian Islamic Jihad”, were on Saddam’s payroll. They are who recruited Bin Ladin, and they are who formed his inner circle. Bin Ladin’s connection to Saddam has been hidden in plain sight all along.
And we have discussed endlessly here the connections from both the first World Trade Center attack and the second one that led back to Saddam.
Its a murky world out there, Bin Ladin has received help from the Saudi royals, and Iran, and Saddam. Most people are prepared to focus on one leg while ignoring the other two. Saddam certainly knew about 911 before it happened and hinted strongly that he ordered it. No “war on terror” was going to be successful that left him in power.
And no war on terror was going to be successful that armed the very same Al Qaeda and handed them the keys to the middle east. That was Obama’s policy. Not Bush’s.
The biggest blunder in the Middle East was the one that started it all; Jimmy Carter abandoning the Shah of Iran.
You’re right. It was downhill from there on.
Bull
Iran was deep into the Iraqi central gov’t before W left office.
Should have let Saddam stay pinned in as we had him. There is no revisionist history on this, it is a terrible debacle that has set our foreign policy back for the next 50 years
More complete bull.
Saddam as contained. Was spending most of his time keeping control of Iraq.
This nonsense here that Saddam had anything to do with 9/11 has consistently been proven false over and over.
The stated reason Bush #1 refused to depose Hussein during the Gulf War, when it would have been so easy, was to keep from de-stabilizing the region.
Just something to think about ...
What ignorance. Saddam and Quadaffi were just as vicious as iran.
That part of the world has always been unstable more so since the dominance of islam.
Saddam and Quadaffi were stabilizers.
Bingo.
But a whole bunch of people living inside the DC beltway made a ton of $$$
Saudi Arabia is just as vicious as the others, but they just pretend to be our friends.
If Saddam’s son Quesay had taken over, we would be attacked; second, many suffered in his rape rooms and there was endless suffering at the hands of Uday as well. That regime was tough, kept people in line, but ended up being horrific. I’ve watched documentaries and of course, in 2003 there were documentaries about how he kept detailed files of his victims.
Their religion gives them a sort of fatalism and they aren’t equipped to be responsible for themselves - the perfect fodder for dictators of any sort. They don’t seem to want to self-govern.
To me the problem is their entire mindset - the hypnotism of praying so many times every day, the unquestioning of rituals and ideologies from centuries ago, the rationalizing of brutality (although we see that here with Planned Parenthood). There is something with that “religion” that I don’t think we Christian westerners can ever really grasp although Winston Churchill did a good job of describing it.
Stable? As stable as the path of a nuke tipped ICBM?
Dude, we destroyed and occupied the WRONG country.
By your stated measure above, we should have eliminated the Mullahs in Iran instead.
Certainly, then, if we needed to take out Iraq it would have been much easier and we would have incurred far, far fewer losses.
Iran's support to the resistance in Iraq cost at least 2,000 American lives and probably another 5,000 wounded.
George H. should have encouraged the Israelis to keep going after Saddam; I believe that if Saddam had been taken out, I am certain things would be much, much different. Saddam was never a good man and kept plans to build chemical weapons. He used chemical weapons against the Kurds and I’m certain that we would be in danger if he was still in power.
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