Jessica Blue said:
Are they standing idle now? How has the world been made a great deal safer from unrest and terrorism...?
If Iraq is turned into a democratic country, I think it should be obvious how the world is made safer.
I think that premise is a very shaky foundation for war. Using that logic there are several other countries, in more advanced stages of weaponry which could be deemed a "threat to the free world". Why Iraq, a greatly weakened country under the scrutiny of the UN?
Because of Saddam's demonstrated willingness to attack his neighbors and use chemical weapons on his opponents. Because over a decade of diplomacy had failed. And because economic sanctions could not work when he could make billions smuggling oil through Syria.
They were...they just weren't willing to swallow President Bush's opportunistic doctrine of pre-emption and didn't see war as a first resort. Hans Blix asked for more time...why wasn't it given?
It had been twelve years since Iraq agreed to comply by UN security council resolutions, and it had not. How the hell much more time do they need, and why should we give it to them?
George Bush ordered troops into Iraq under a security doctrine, forged after Sept. 11 in the war on terrorism, that says the United States can launch a pre-emptive strike on a country it deems a threat before it is attacked itself. In the case of Iraq, his argument was that Saddam's alleged weapons of mass destruction not only posed a threat to the region but could also fall into the hands of groups like al Qaeda and be turned on America. As yet no clear evidence to support this claim has been established.
Uncertain threats are exactly that - uncertain. We know Saddam hated us. He tried to have a US president assasinated, and he regularly fired at US and British aircraft. He used chemical weapons on civilians. I don't know what he would do with a nuke, or with a large stockpile of chemical weapons, but I don't want to find out either. And I don't think taking a bloodthirsty, oppressive dictator out of power just to be on the safe side is a bad idea.
As the pre-war pitch progressed, he continued to talk of disarming Iraq, yet increasingly in a secondary manner. "Freeing the Iraqi people" appeared to have now become his major rationale for going to war. Why this shift?
Two things: first, I don't feel the need to defend Bush. I think the war was justified. I don't care if my reasons for it being justified are the same as Bush's: if it was the right thing to do, it was the right thing to do.
Second, there isn't as much of a shift as people like to pretend. Bush talked plenty about human rights before the invasion. Many critics only paid attention to the WMD issue because nobody could seriously challenge just how bad the human rights situation in Iraq was.
If saving the Iraqis was the big motivation for invading Iraq why wasn't this made clear from the beginning?
I think it was. I think a lot of people weren't paying attention to that, because they didn't seriously care about that. And I'm not talking about the supporters of the war.
When we concentrate on Iraq as a victory of liberation we are apt to forget that this war was an important test for a new political doctrine which opened the way for countries to use pre-emptive attack as a justifiable rationale for war. The attitude now seems to be "the WMDS might have been a massive exaggeration...but the liberation makes it all okay." Does it...? Does this now mean pre-emption need not justify itself through evidence of threat...but merely on a decision that this or that tyrant deserves to go?
Well, to be quite blunt, yes. I think Saddam did need to go. He was not just "this or that tyrant". He was one of the worst dictators of this century, directly responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. And his oil reserves gave him potentially enormous resources to support his ruthless regime and quest for nuclear weapons, resources that most dictators do not have. So yeah, I think it actually was OK to take him out just to take him out. But you also seem to be confusing something: the fact that we haven't found anything doesn't mean we weren't right to go in for preventive reasons (though I do not condone overstating our certainty about Saddam's current capabilities). It's like car insurance: you buy it because the possibility of not buying it can be enormous. But if you DON'T get in an accident, was it the wrong decision to buy insurace? Of course not, because you can't know ahead of time. So, was it OK to remove a bloodthirsty, oppressive tyrant who continually tried to kill americans (yes, he did - he regularly fired missiles at american planes) because of uncertain risk? Yeah, I'd say so.
Even ignoring the dangerous political turmoil[which cannot in truth, be seperated from the whole] the restoration of Iraq may yet prove to be too great a task.
Maybe, maybe not. But I'd much rather try than leave them rotting under Saddam, which people like Malachi seemed quite content to do in the name of preserving a dictator's sovereignty.
