Atiya
Active member
- Joined
- Sep 20, 2014
- Messages
- 287
- Reaction score
- 143
- Location
- New York, NY
- Gender
- Female
- Political Leaning
- Slightly Liberal
How can anyone know what would happen had Saddam stayed in power and allowed to continue to commit his atrocities and maintain his tyrannical regime?
You can say that he had a stable regime, sure I guess if that's something one can consider to be stable, but so did Assad until what, four years ago? And the US and the world didn't take him out, so how come Syria suddenly moved from a status of complete stability (again, if you can consider it as such) to the status of chaos and eternal bloodshed that it exists in, in recent years?
I don't think anyone can determine what would be the situation in Iraq by now had Saddam stayed in power.
You miss the point. Saddam Hussein had used mustard gas on the Kurds and some Iranians in the Iran-Iraq war and the US remained friendly with the Iraqi dictator. Clearly using nerve gas on its own citizens, the Kurds, did not prevent the US and Iraq friendship from developing full steam. There was absolutely no reason for the US to invade Iraq.* The talk of WMD was propaganda pure and simple and exaggerated by this term "we don't want to wait until we see a mushroom cloud over our heads" by Condoleezza Rice. Cheney wanted to invade Iraq for profiteering and complete control of Iraqi oil contracts. The 9/11 attack seem to give the GWB/Cheney administration exactly what they wanted, a motive to go to war and they took full advantage. They first went to Afghanistan, obstensibly to look for Bin Ladin, and after a few days, left a skeleton crew in that Taliban country and went directly to invade Iraq. They tried to make a connection between Iraq and 9/11 but were unable to do so. The US should never have invaded Iraq because we did not have a reason.
*The first Gulf War, Desert Storm, was for political reasons only! George Herbert Walker Bush was hoping to be elected for a second term, but his poll numbers were extremely low, showing he was unlikely to be reelected. (Bush realized that in a time of war, the American people tend to rally around their president and that would give him the edge over his opponent for reelection.) Saddam had said repeatedly he was going to invade Kuwait, which realistically at one time, was a part of Iraq. The senior Bush said the US would not interfere in neighborhood matters between people in the middle east. That attitude gave Saddam Hussein the green light, to go ahead and invade Kuwait as the US would not intervene. Even the US Embassador, Aprile Glaspy, never alerted the dictator the US would intervene if he went ahead and invaded Kuwait.
As soon as Saddam invaded Kuwait, the two-faced Geoge Herbert Walker Bush put together a coalition of countries to oust Saddam from Kuwait. To the president's credit, he did not invade Iraq, only forced Hussein back into his lair. The senior Bush got a bump out of the brief war (only a few days), but the higher poll numbers did not last long and he lost his reelection.