Either way he is wrong. Going in was not a bad decision. If we were indeed going after terrorist Saddam was the #1 terrorist at that time. It was the failure of Bush to get UN backing for the long process of rebuilding a war torn country. While our military had no trouble removing Saddam from power and crushing his military it was the rebuilding that would need the worlds cooperation. Obama pulling out the troops was also wrong. Once the US has made a commitment it should be honored by the next president. Instead he pulled the troops out of Iraq and put them in Afghanistan. He should have finished Iraq before undertaking another military operation or committed enough troops to do both. It was not the removal of leader that was terrorizing millions of people that was the wrong. It was the party bickering that did not allow us to follow through with what we started. Both parties clearly were for removing or Saddam from power. Clearly the loss of commitment by the democrats after the fact was the ultimate failing.
Just...no.
1. A meglomaniacal dictator like Saddam simply is not a threat to U.S. National Security. They are a threat to their people, but that is not why we went in. We went in because the Bush admin said he had WMDs and drew on our fear/anger following 9/11 to insinuate that Saddam was a "terrorist" and therefore a threat to our National Security.
2. "Party bickering" had precisely nothing to do with the follow-through. Bush was CiC. He had as much control as he wanted over the invasion and post-invasion efforts.
3. You also seem to be forgetting that Obama was elected on a platform of getting out of Iraq, and even the Iraqis wanted us to go.
4. We simply cannot afford to be world police nor are we good at it. If you think we should have been in Iraq to get Saddam simply because he was a bad man, what about Sudan? Somalia? Libya? Egypt? Saudi Arabi? Iran? The world is full of bad murderous governments and we quite plainly cannot deal with even a fraction of them. Your position, if you mean it, seems to compel you to say we should be in all of those countries right now.
But then I get to last sentence and see that yours is an argument purely from bias. (I mean really. Bush says there are WMDs in Iraq and that Saddam is going to sell one to terrorists to use on us, so congress backs him up. And now, 15 years later, this is supposed to be ultimately the Democrats fault?)
I think you need to recheck those numbers. If you want to compare apples to apples Stalin ordered the deaths of 3 to 4 million out of a population or close to 200 million. Saddam killed close to 1 million out of 30 million. Either way Stalin did not kill half the people of Russia.
I think
you need to recheck those numbers. The very first google result turns up:
Indeed, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the literary giant who wrote harrowingly about the Soviet gulag system, claimed the true number of Stalin’s victims might have been as high as 60 million. Most other estimates from reputed scholars and historians tend to range from between 20 and 60 million.
In his book, “Unnatural Deaths in the U.S.S.R.: 1928-1954,” I.G. Dyadkin estimated that the USSR suffered 56 to 62 million "unnatural deaths" during that period, with 34 to 49 million directly linked to Stalin. In “Europe A History,” British historian Norman Davies counted 50 million killed between 1924-53, excluding wartime casualties.
How Many People Did Joseph Stalin Kill?
I definitely recall seeing someone arguing as high as I stated, but I'm not going to bother tracking it down because this is close enough. These also don't seem to include the 10-20 million killed in WWII, which deaths were often the result of horrible strategic planning by Stalin, and scant proper equipment, again because of Stalin's economic policies.
