Yeah, that.
The question that I'd ask is why is it taking down Saddam such a wrong / bad thing to do, where as bringing down Assad, Gheddafi and Mubarak were / are good things to do?
Does it matter who's in the White House? You think?
It would be foolish to rule it out, who is in the White House will impact foreign policy and perception of the leaders of other nations to some degree. The flip side of that coin is Obama became the 4th President in a row to drop a bomb on Iraq for one reason or another. Which goes beyond Saddam's era of reign making me question both costs and impact of our decisions.
Our issue is handling a very hypocritical condition where we deem one dictatorship as a problem based on some listed reason(s,) but ignore the actions of other dictatorships when it suits our interests. Worse, when we decide that we can live with less than ideal world leaders.
The question then becomes are we really basing our decisions on who is a "bad guy" on some legitimate concern over human rights and "freedoms" *or* are we basing our concerns over when a dictatorship no longer is to our benefit.
Like, Saddam who we not only somewhat helped into power but also in his fight with neighboring Iran. Or, like helping the Mujahideen "rebels" when they fought the invading Russians, only later for some of them to end up as members of everyone from Al-Qaeda to the Taliban. Or, like Mubarak who was in control of Egypt during the time that the US provided some $18 billion in military aid. Making Egypt the second largest non-NATO recipient of U.S. military aid after Israel. When we call these guys "bad guys" then becomes very suspect.
It is then easy to argue we are disliked and distrusted by a good third of the planet because of our hypocritical and confusing foreign policy that both creates problems but also questionably "solves" a problem. The world probably is better off without Saddam, or Mubarak, or Gaddafi, or a dozen ideological lunatics.
What the issue becomes is our determination on when a dictatorship is a problem vs. other times we typically ignore the problem or even help them. Saudi Arabia is the best example of that mentality of deciding who is acceptable and who is not. We get plenty out of that deal, and we generally ignore their oppressive and cruel reign of power over their people. They behead more people than Iran, but Iran is the problem? We sure? Perhaps a close second is Saddam himself whom we once supported then later overthrew. Syria and al-Assad is in the mix as well who we call a problem because of their relationship to Putin. al-Assad really all that worse than these other lunatics we get in bed with?
I simply no longer trust these decisions being made, costing military lives and trillions of dollars when objectively looking at all of our history for and involvement in this area of the planet. It is also easy to argue the unrest across the expanded region with plenty of nations our hands were involved in. And like many other subjects, the history books will not be too kind to Bush 43 for the reasons and costs to remove Saddam only to see Iraq become the disaster that it is today allowing for another group of opportunity to capitalize... ISIS (as an example.) I am not sure that the history books will be all that kind to our Nobel Peace Prize winning Obama either.
I no longer see these actions as "good things" when I see the results (in every meaning of the word.) I am not asking for isolationism, just a little rational consideration for what has happened to date and honestly what we have *not* solved.
