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.
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.
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.
“..There is no argument that the middle east is far less stable now...”
Yes, Saddam had to go. No two ways about that. It was a war that needed to be fought...and unfortunately was not allowed to be finished. And yep, Bush One should have let “Stormin’ Norman” go all the way to Baghdad and do the job...but again, like Viet Nam, POLITICS got in the way and ruined the right path to getting that job done. As another poster noted, we learned our lesson in Viet Nam, but the Washington elites did NOT. Even knowing that the Nam War could have been won in MONTHS if the military had been allowed to fight it right. I served during the beginnings of the Nam War and was in a job that let me see what was coming. And it ended up as predicted, wasting over 50,000 good lives and untold amounts of treasure.
It will be interesting to see how things go now in the Middle East especially with a REAL American president coming....it had better happen. So much needs to be fixed. God help us.
You can thank the UN for brokering Saddam’s “truce”. Would have said “go to hell” and run it out into a unconditional surrender.