Maybe I'm missing something, but if my (hypothetical) son goes and makes friends with bad kids, that doesn't mean I have ties with those kids. Especially if my son is making plans with the bad kids for the aftermath of my death or exile. To me, such "ties" seem rather tenuous at best.
As for Saddam being a bad guy, I agree with you and everybody else. However, the world is full of bad people, several of which are known to have the capacity to make and utilize nuclear weapons (North Korea comes to mind). Saddam was indeed our man in the '80s (anything to stop those damned Eye-Rainians!) but it's been years since he last did anything we told him to. He didn't just rise up, suddenly uncontrollable, and pose an immediate threat. He's been oppressing his people for years and we didn't step in to take him down until now? We had some dodgy, limited "information" about supposed weapons of mass destruction and dealings to obtain uranium that hadn't even been incorporated into weapons yet. That sounds like Terror Alert Level: Chartreuse to me.
And as for helping the Iraqi people, it comes to a question of intent, not result. The point is not that the Iraqi people are "more free" than they had been. The point is that George W. Bush and Co. did not spend billions upon billions upon billions of dollars to liberate the Iraqi people. The United States of America is not in the business of lifting up the downtrodden (at least not on foreign soil). We help other countries out if and only if it suits our interests. And I may be the only one, but I believe that we went into Iraq with perfectly noble intentions of liberating Iraqi oil products from wallets without Stars and Stripes on them. The so-called liberation of those poor oppressed Iraqi people is a cruel joke when so much other injustice exists elsewhere in the world (Israel comes to mind, but I'm not going there in this already-rambling post). If oil wasn't the goal, then re-election was. And just because the Iraqi people are free doesn't mean that that's why we did what we did.
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chiming
I respectfully disagree.
Date: 2004-01-25 05:02 pm (UTC)From:As for Saddam being a bad guy, I agree with you and everybody else. However, the world is full of bad people, several of which are known to have the capacity to make and utilize nuclear weapons (North Korea comes to mind). Saddam was indeed our man in the '80s (anything to stop those damned Eye-Rainians!) but it's been years since he last did anything we told him to. He didn't just rise up, suddenly uncontrollable, and pose an immediate threat. He's been oppressing his people for years and we didn't step in to take him down until now? We had some dodgy, limited "information" about supposed weapons of mass destruction and dealings to obtain uranium that hadn't even been incorporated into weapons yet. That sounds like Terror Alert Level: Chartreuse to me.
And as for helping the Iraqi people, it comes to a question of intent, not result. The point is not that the Iraqi people are "more free" than they had been. The point is that George W. Bush and Co. did not spend billions upon billions upon billions of dollars to liberate the Iraqi people. The United States of America is not in the business of lifting up the downtrodden (at least not on foreign soil). We help other countries out if and only if it suits our interests. And I may be the only one, but I believe that we went into Iraq with perfectly noble intentions of liberating Iraqi oil products from wallets without Stars and Stripes on them. The so-called liberation of those poor oppressed Iraqi people is a cruel joke when so much other injustice exists elsewhere in the world (Israel comes to mind, but I'm not going there in this already-rambling post). If oil wasn't the goal, then re-election was. And just because the Iraqi people are free doesn't mean that that's why we did what we did.