I am a Papist. Born and bread. However, The fact is that Saddam Hussein killed millions of his own people attacked two neighbors, killing hundreds of thousands more yet it was not a moral war as far as the Vatican was concerned in order to remove him. What has changed in Iraq? ISIS is more open in its’ brutality, but are they any more brutal?
Leaders like Saddam are par for the course in the Arab World.
The world was better off when the Ottomans kept the Arabs in line....Some tribes just aren’t good at the self-rule thing.
Maybe the pope should call for military intervention to stop muslims. In whatever hole we find them. Then we might get somewhere, otherwise we are just reacting to the fruit of the tree of islam. Uproot it, and burn it to ash, so that nothing remains.
Ditto for Quaddaffi
The ARab world recognizes only dictatorship or chaos, nothing in between
If we had not been involved in Gulf War One, then Saddam right now would be slaughtering jihadis, having defeated Iran with his oil money and would be threatening Saudi Arabia, the birthplace and source of jihadi teaching
Gulf War one lead to 9/11 and to the Islamic state -- GW was a mistake
“What has changed in Iraq?”
One of the points necessary for a “Just War” is that it will not cause more harm than it will end. Has Iraq experienced less harm or more harm since we invaded in 2003? Quite frankly things are much worse there than under Hussein. Hussein was boxed in in 2003 and could only hurt his own people and he was not nearly as bad in that regard as ISIS is.
“ISIS is more open in its’ brutality, but are they any more brutal?”
Yes. Hussein never really targeted entire peoples merely because of who they were. As long as people cooperated with him he didn’t bother them.
Jim from C-Town:
that was in essence a civil war. There are tons of inter-country battles going on over ethnic rivalries or religion. If history is a lesson, getting involved in a civil war of another country is never a good thing. The first Iraq War was legitimate as Saddam attacked another country and probably would not have stopped. This last war was FUBAR, never supported it, never thought it was a good idea.
What is going on now with ISIS is a cancer that is growing, they are not going to stop with taking parts of Syria and Iraq. They are already moving into parts of Lebanon and Jordan. Saddam was no different than the idiot in North Korea, who has killed many of his own people, yet nobody is calling for an invasion of North Korea.
Saddam was targeting individuals because of religion [Christians were never targeted for simply being Christian], he killed political rivals to his power. He was a brutal dictator yes, but no different than the other dictators over the years who repressed and killed political rivals, yet we did not invade those countries either, Cambodia in the early 70’s is another example.