And pigs might have taken wing at sunrise. His armed forces weren't keeping him in power, his armed thugs, secret police, and irregulars were. There is no reason whatever to assume that the situation would not simply have continued pretty much indefinitely, given that they had succeeded in doing so for 12 years after those armed forces were defeated. This has been the situation in North Korea for half a century, after all.
No, the fact of the matter is that the decision was a tough but simple one: did the deciders judge that the advantages of armed intervention to their countries outweigh the disadvantages? The advantages are legion, but some among many were the downfall of a proven invader of his neighbors, the cessation of known programs of weapons development, and the removal of a major state prop for terrorism targeted at the deciders' countries. The disadvantages were pointed out by many authors, and included the danger of promoting preventative warfare as a policy tool, the certainty of collateral damage in terms of lives and economies, and the expense and difficulty of a stabilizing occupation.
In my personal opinion the judgment was a sound one and the activities appropriate. There was at no point the possibility of unalloyed success, and it is disingenuous in the extreme for the left to make unalloyed success their benchmark for any intervention at all, as this author and others are doing today.
In my personal opinion the judgment was a sound one and the activities appropriate. There was at no point the possibility of unalloyed success, and it is disingenuous in the extreme for the left to make unalloyed success their benchmark for any intervention at all, as this author and others are doing today.
Good points.