Brandon9000 wrote:One could compile such a list of criteria, but I will be close enough to the mark if I say that someone on the level of a Hitler, a Stalin, a Hussein, or a Pol Pot
I'm sorry, Saddam was a terrible dictator but in no way can he be compared with Stalin, Hitler or Pol Pot. Stalin was singlehandedly responsible for how many deaths - 40, 60 million? Hitler, 20 million? Pol Pot killed a third or half of his own people.
Saddam doesnt rank with that. Yes, he tried to gas the Kurds, but he didn't kill anything like half of them, the gas attacks themselves involved "just" several towns. Yes, he bombed the Marsh Arabs, but both Kurds and Marsh Arabs were minorities - the overall population was victimised to the terror of a police state, not to an effective genocide.
This must sound very cynical, but we have to be able to differentiate even between levels of utter evil if we are to make sound estimations and decisions ourselves. We have to be able to differentiate between a Horthy, a Pinochet, a Saddam, a Pol Pot and a Hitler - and those are roughly the categories I'd be thinking of. Saddam ranks 'above' Pinochet or Mobutu but definitively below general Bagasora of Rwanda or Pol Pot.
By consistently equating him with Stalin and Hitler you suggest he was one of those unique once-a-half-century perpetrators of as of yet unparallelled mass murder; in effect, he was more like the primus inter pares of third world dictators, terrorising his population, bullying his neighbours and going on killing sprees among the country's minorities. Thats all bad enough in itself, and on the basis of these 'humanitarian' grounds I would actually have supported an invasion when, for example, the gassing of the Kurds was actually ongoing, back in the late eighties, when they were not safely ensconsed in their own autonomous region yet. But Pol Pot it aint - thats just politically motivated rhetorics.