Scrat wrote:How many innocent Bosnians is Clinton "responsible" for killing, and why aren't you here wringing your hands over those deaths? Is it that you like Iraqis more than Bosnians, or is it simply that you don't really care about the deaths so much as you see it as one more thing to use to castigate Bush?
And as I've stated before, your overly-simplistic viewpoint assumes that the tragic death count from the war is higher than the death count would have been from just leaving the Iraqi people to the whims of Saddam and his henchmen. The statistical evidence shows that a civilian is FAR more likely to be killed by the totalitarian regime under which he lives than in a war.
Now this post is a LOT more interesting than the others. It raises a crucial enough underlying question: when is war the lesser of two evils? When does war become the humanitarian alternative? Its the one credible case the proponents of war had, in any case.
The historical track record you show cites enough evidence. WW2, yeah. Sad thing is, it also immediately shows that the wars that most deserved the humanitarian rationale often werent fought for it in the least. WW2 wasnt fought over the Holocaust - hell, it took a few years of lobbying before the Allied armies could be persuaded to take the odd detour or two to bomb some of the railways that led to the concentration camps ...
I dont think, if we look at Iraq, much has changed in that regard - any humanitarian gains from ousting Saddam were pleasant side-effects rather than the mainstay of the war's rationale. Thats my (cynical) opinion. Bosnia could in that respect much more easily claim humanitarian credentials, simply because the Balkans were so obviously a place of fairly little material or strategic value for the Americans - to wanna fight over Kosovo, you
must have idealist motivations. <grins>
One major problem with your argument over Iraq is that, though Saddam stood for one of those utterly evil regimes that are most easily recognized as irredeemable (unlike Iran, for example), his regime arguably posed less of a danger to his own people than at any time in the previous thirty years or so. Back in 1988, Saddam was gassing the Kurds, and the US were feting him - whereas in 2003, when the US were arguing humanitarian intervention, the Kurds were safe in their own independently governed statelet. Back in 1992, Saddam bombed the Shiítes to smithereens when they responded to the American-encouraged call for insurrection, but the US army stood by - by 2003, Saddam's bombers could not even go to South-Iraq because of the no-fly zone. Saddam's regime by 2003 was weak, and though I'm sure he still had thousands of innocents in torture chambers, anything similar to the mass expulsions and ethnocides of the former Yugoslavia was unlikely to occur anytime soon. He was no (longer) Pol Pot, even if he might still have wanted to be.
So you may still be right, if you count on the long term - if Saddam had survived long enough, he would still have killed more, in the end, than have been killed now. But that's a tricky comparison, cause seeing how volatile the situation in Iraq is now, we're not all that sure how many people will die the next few years now that the US
has liberated Iraq, either. And meanwhile, if you're trying to compare the year that has passed since war broke out with how many Saddam would have killed
in the same year, I doubt you would come up with anything that would make war look good.
So though I find your argument that war is sometimes better than dictatorship convincing, its not actually that argument in itself that most of us are objecting to here - we are just disagreeing that it would apply in this case.
Nice to talk to you tho, amidst all the mindless one-liner posts.
