Foxfyre wrote:To Kicky:
Hypotheticals are worthless unless backed up by history. The historical records is that over the last 20+ years, 300,000 (at least--some Iraqi spokesmen have cited many more than that) people have been put to death at the hands/order/consent of Saddam Hussein.
IMO, there is no reason to believe that this practice would not have continued under Saddam or his sons had they been left in power unopposed.
Now if that is not a factor in your assessment of the U.S. policy toward Iraq, that's fine. It is a factor in my assessment of U.S. policy toward Iraq.
According to Human Rights Watch, the figure is 250,000 to 290,000 in the entire period of Hussein's regime, from 1978 to 2003. That's a period of 25 years. Even if one were so witless as to consider this a constant, that argues against 300,000 deaths under his continued rule. (Some journalism major, it's lucky for the news consuming public that such facile methods of judging probabilities are not being foisted on them.)
Such a position, that the rate of death of Iraqi citizens is more or less constant, is witless, however, because it ignores unique events in that 25 year span which would not only not necessarily recur, but very likely
would not recur. The Iran-Iraq war was one factor which would likely not be repeated--the gas attack on a Kurdish town took place then, and whether or not it was true, as some contend, that this was an attack on the Persians which went wrong, such an event was not likley to recur. Any use of WoMD's by Hussein would have brought the
world, and not simply the cowboy in the White House, down on him like a ton of bricks. We had a lid on Hussein's military adventurism, and we were sitting on it. Another factor this rather witless assessment ignores is that "Kurdistan," a good third of the northern part of this abortion of a nation, was under the control of the Kurds, and Hussein's writ no longer ran there. Additionally, this feeble point of view ignores that a great many of the estimated 250- to 290,000 "missing persons" estimated by Human Rights Watch were victims of the failed uprising in 1991, encouraged by Bush's Pappy, who then stood by and watched the slaughter. Ironically, a good many of the Shiites who were made homeless by that ruthless suppression ended up in the shanty town known as Sadr City, in Hussein's backyard.
Finally, this is the meat of the conservative apologist school. We went to war because the American people in good faith bought the administration's line about emminent danger of the use of WoMD, and a connection between Hussein and Al Qaeda. In these fora, these allegations were disputed and denied well before the war began. Anyone with a reasonable knowledge of the Middle East and its political and religious dynamics in the last few generations knew that Hussein stood out as a secular dictator, who repressed any deviation from orthodox Sunni belief, in particular hunting down the Wahabbi followers who are the core of Bin Laden's support in the Arabian Peninsula.
But the failure to deliver the proof of the WoMD allegations has left the Right in the position of attempting feebly to continue the allegations about connections to Islamic terrorism. More than anything else, though, the Right has their mantra about how much better of the Iraqis are now. That's a fine thing, and the future, not even the distant future, but the near future may prove that this is so. That is a retrospective justification, however, and made by itself, would not have induced the Congress to make a joint resolution giving war powers to the Shrub.
The song is riddled with false notes, but the Right sings it as loudly as possible--it's all they have left to hang on to now.
I already knew McG is, some are totally lost souls :sad:
I guess that answers my question...
