Bush to Saddam: Get out of Iraq in two days or prepare to die.

[A Black Falcon]

Looking at the early pages of the thread, the one thing I get wrong is the assumption that Sadaam had some kind of banned weapons; as we know, he didn't, though he probably thought he did (being lied to by his scientists, etc.). But other than that, I agree with myself. :)

Things are definitely more complex now, though... the Syria and Ukraine issues are complicated and challenging ones, and aren't quite as clearcut (what we did then was clearly wrong) as Iraq was in '03, I think. On Syria I can't help but think that we should have done more to help the rebels, but now it's probably too late -- Assad is winning the war, and it's probably too late to do anything about it. Of course, it didn't help at all that a lot of rebels were (and are) religious extremists, so there just weren't enough obviously friendly rebels in Syria to work with... so we were cautious, while Russia went all-in supporting Assad, and here we now are with a bad situation on our hands. After saying "Assad must go"... well, he's still here, and doesn't look likely to go anywhere soon.

And in Ukraine, seriously, we can't allow Russia to just steal part (or maybe half, if they go in and really tear apart Ukraine!) of Ukraine. Yeah, I'm not too happy with Russia these days for sure... taking the Crimea was blatantly illegal, and his actions in pushing the pro-Russian sepratists in the East are pretty bad as well. The sanctions we've put in place in response are a good start, and may be working, though, but more of them would be good. Russia CAN be affected by sanctions now, much more so than in Soviet days, which is an issue for Putin...