11th January 2007, 12:24 AM
Quote:Saddam started a war that ordered the eradication of millions of people (completing nearly all of the task) as well as the deaths of those who opposed him and belonged to the wrong religious group.
You didn't read, or remember your history, correctly. Saddaam was trying to oppress and crush the revolts of the Kurds and Sunnis, but did not try to wipe them out on a large scale. Hitler's entire goal was the complete destruction of whole peoples. Even pretending that they have any similarities (beyond being violent dictators) is completely ridiculous. Seriously... the number of deaths that can be blamed on Hitler is so many orders of magnitude higher than the number that can be blamed on Saddaam that your argument completely falls apart upon examination.
And that's not even getting into the methods -- that is, how the hallmark of German brutality was a very efficient, highly centralized system of camps and records, while Iraq's... was pretty much the exact opposite of that, to say the least...
Quote:(1) You just contradicted your self, you said most of Saddam's victims were Shi'ite and Kurd no Sunni. Then you go on to say Saddam's regime was notorious for their for abusing Sunni.
No, they were well known for abusing everyone, not just the Sunnis in specific.
Even so, with all of Saddaam's horrible actions, as I said, when you compare even Saddaam's Iraq to its neighbors, it suddenly doesn't look quite so bad... or more accurately, it doesn't look much if any worse than they are... (like virtually every country on the planet better than Saudi Arabia on women's rights, while being worse on random violence and oppression of minorities; compared to Iran, better on religion (Saddaam being a secular, and not a religious, ruler, Iraq was not governed by Sharia law until the Shi'ites took power after we deposed Iran -- a very good thing in many ways, as you'd know if you know much about Sharia... of course instead we had Saddaam's despotism, but still, for the Sunnis who were not being targetted by the government for whatever reason, things were better than they are now.), etc...
Really, saying "Saddaam is gone! Yay" is one thing, but thinking about what to do next... well, the people in charge now want Sharia and all of its oppression enforced. This is a very bad thing. Was Saddaam better? Well, not Saddaam at the height of his cruelty, but late '90s/early 2000's Saddaam, surrounded by US troops and forced to somewhat cooperate? That one was much less dangerous on the whole... still a threat to his own people, of course, but not on the scale of earlier.
Quote:(2) Everyone there is killing and maiming in the name of Mohammad so that makes it right?
It makes the causes of the killing understandable; of course it does not make them right.
Quote:(3) So it's better they be powerful tyrants than live under the rule of one? I think that's the greater of 2 evils.
What do you mean here?
Quote:Saddam's sentence was cared out quick and painlessly according to the traditions of his own people, using the justice system best available to the technology and society level of the people (a hanging).
We were the ones who handed him over to them, knowing what would happen next. That makes us the most responsible ones for this... and as for the "traditions of his people", his greatest crimes were not ones for a national court but for an international one, as I said. I know that this administration would NEVER, EVER do that, because they hate the idea of working with other nations or following international law (a truth typified with the fact that the US invasion of Iraq Bush led flagrantly broke international law), but it would have been a far better option.
Of course the ACTUAL good option would have been to stay out and let the weapons inspectors finish their inspections, conclude that Saddaam had nothing, and show before we went in and started this whole thing that the main excuse for going to war wasn't true, but Bush wanted an invasion, not an exposition of the facts, so he didn't do that. Wait and they might decide against you, after all, and we can't have that... vengeance (for his father not taking out Saddaam in 1991), Big Oil (economic interests are almost always incredibly powerful in pushing wars...), and the desire for something to bump up the Republicans in the next election (and maybe more reasons, but those are the main ones) mattered far more. But we didn't, and now we're there, and we're suffering for it...
I do believe that since we started the civil war in Iraq (by having no plan for what to do once we destroyed the government and not realizing somehow that allowing people who hate eachother free rein to go at eachother would go horribly badly) we have a responsibility to find a way to end it, but Bush doesn't care about that, and Congress doesn't either, so I don't know if that's ever going to happen... it's either an impossible "Victory" or leaving and letting the Iraqis kill themselves without US troops in the way pushing it to the front page of the papers every day so that we can forget about it and pretend that it's over... (though, because we don't seem to have any actual good, viable options to end it right now, that might actually be the best choice... ... I do think that the "Split Iraq up three ways and find a way to get them to fairly divide the oil revenues" is the best solution, though. I don't see how anything less could end this...)