Reply #9: It's an interesting question, but thoroughly off-topic [View All]

[0rganism]

Even though you phrased it as passive-tense, it's well worth serious discussion. But we have to put it in context, to do so without indulging false dichotomies.

See, you posted several articles which present honest-to-goodness real-life humanitarian reasons to overthrow Saddam Hussein's totalitarian regime. But instead of referring to those documents in supporting an invasion of Iraq, the bush administration saw fit to roll out mountains of false and misleading allegations to "make the case for war". Only post-invasion, now that the WMDs are proving to be just as gone as the UN inspectors said they were, and the bogus linking of Ba'athists with Al Qaeda has been shown to be so much bullshit, is the administration resorting to humanitarian justifications for its actions.

We knew for decades about the murderous crap that was going down in Iraq, Saddam's role as a bloody dictator is well-documented, and all this was allowed to happen -- even encouraged by Reagan and Bush Sr. Why did these atrocities suddenly start to matter in 2003?

The simple answer is that they didn't: human rights violations are seldom taken as a sufficient justification for unilateral action. If we were really concerned about human rights violations, we wouldn't have propped up regimes like Somoza's and Batista's and D'Aubisson's and, yes, Saddam Hussein's. Right now, there are numerous regimes committing serious humanitarian offenses, some of which are well known to have WMDs, which are permitted to continue as usual; if humanitarian interventions against countries were our hallmark, we wouldn't be selling weaponry to Israel. American foreign policy has been driven by profitability since its inception; as long as Saddam was useful as a point of regional stability, his regime was tolerated. After all, it had been crippled after Ambassador Glaspie invited Saddam Hussein to invade Kuwait -- had our government so desired, we would have supported the Shi'ite and Kurdish uprisings during Gulf War 1 and taken Saddam down then and there.

Instead, we LET Saddam put down the insurgencies with his Republican Guard and evolved a sanctions regime in the name of "containment".

No one makes the case for this better than Bush Sr. himself. He points out that Saddam Hussein, for all his flaws, was preventing a three-way civil war and a genocidal invasion by Turkey. Now Saddam is gone, and we've inherited those problems in full. The administration went into this process without a sound plan, apparently believing its own propaganda, and now we're starting to reap a whirlwind.

So your question is if I believe Saddam Hussein should have been left in power. I don't -- but then, I don't believe we should have put him in power in the first place. I also think it's becoming abundantly clear, even to some rightwing imperialists, that a unilateral invasion and occupation by the United States military was not the best way to accomplish his removal. And the administration's abundant lying to the American people in order to trigger this suboptimal, ill-planned invasion is a grievous crime that places our national credibility in jeopardy.

Ideally, we would have let the Iraqi peoples depose him themselves. Then, the UN could have intervened to mitigate their civil war and assisted in the formation of a legitimate parliamentary demo/theocracy suitable to the region. In no way should the bush administration have "gone it alone" and marched into Iraq with only token support from a handful of bribed non-regional allies, let alone lied to the people of the USA -- and, indeed, the world -- to do so. Now that we're there, we face the other half of the question you asked: "what would be an adequate, feasible replacement for the Ba'ath regime?"

As before, the answer is non-trivial. I suggest you ask your congressman what his plan is.