Quote:
Originally Posted by Urbane Guerrilla
And again, the problems to world security presented by Ba'athist Iraq as run by Saddam -- two invasions and every prospect of more, genocides north and south -- would only be solved by removing Saddam, his sons, and the Ba'ath Party from the picture, and about the only way to do that is with an invasion.
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Ah, I love this line of thinking that our administration shares: the problem will be solved by removing Saddam and not much will be needed beyond that. Force the dictator out, and the people will resolve the rest, right? Everyone over there supports our ideals, so it should all go smoothly. We should only need 5,000 troops stationed in Iraq right now since they should all mostly be pro-American by now, right? Cultural, tribal, political, and religious issues aside, we can fix anything by simply removing the dictator and letting the people do the rest! It really is that easy.
What? You say there's still violence, unrest, and instability? I have no idea why -- the plan was perfect from day one and it was the only way to solve the world's security problem. It must be an outside force, as the difficulty we're experiencing could
never come from within a country we've fully "liberated". Yes, it must be some other entity interfering, someone else that supports the Axis of Evil. It must be Iran, right? What can we possibly do to solve that problem?
I often hear that we're in Iraq because of WMDs/genocide and I often hear that we are there to fight terrorism. By removing the dictator to solve the first problem, we've increased the other. All the air superiority and weaponry in the world will not
change people's minds that are set through religion and hundreds of years of cultural differences. Our army is not equipped to do that. We may have removed a dictator, but that thing you fear so much, terrorism, is being made worse by our actions and the power vacuum we created.
UN rules, international policy, and morals aside, the money, manpower, time, and lives wasted in this war could have been better used to build a successful security force here at home. $366,000,000,000+ would have purchased plenty of x-ray machines, metal detectors, radiation scanners, port security, biological agent detectors, and other federal infrastructure to keep out all those WMDs that didn't even exist in the first place. Hell, think of what good that money could have done in the
other country we invaded and seem to have already forgotten about? Think of how we could have changed people's minds about us that way? Spending $366,000,000,000 dollars on humanitarian aid in Afghanistan would have destroyed twenty times as much terrorism than we've created by going into Iraq. Instead, we spent our resources on destabilizing an entire country, allowing political extremists to not only rise up, but reinforce their ideology, pour over the now unsecured border, and recruit more people that have had their lives turned upside-down by the US invasion.
Is the solution to stop these new terrorists to overthrow the governments of the countries they are coming from? Gee, what do you think would happen if we did that?
We removed a dictator with the full expectation that the people would support us, that there would be no corruption, that no one would attempt to take advantage of a population that grew up under tyranny in a country where a myriad of religious and political groups, both internal and external, were straining to kill each other and take over. You could call that the fault of someone's optimistic dream, but I tend to think we might have, oh, rushed into this war without too much thought. We just needed to do it.
It was the only way.
Oh, if only someone could have warned us! Too bad the only people opposed to this war want us to lose it!
I'd say I'm thankful we didn't destabilize the entire region, but with the recent words coming out against Iran, I don't want to speak too soon.