Was Iraq "better" under Saddam's rule?

[Marsupial]

US is committed to regime change in any number of countries right now.

Not really. The US has been content to let Assad turn Syria into a charnel house and has long conceded that it isn't really in their interests to see him gone. There's hardly a more prime candidate to justifiably remove right now than Bashar al-Assad and the US government is absolutely not pursuing that, despite inaction there currently resulting in the unraveling of gains in Iraq.

What other countries did you have in mind that the US is committed to regime change in?

There's just no logic why Iraq was invaded when it was. Why not Iran, North Korea, Syria, any number of central and south american countries?

With the benefit of hindsight now, Iran may have been a better choice for regime change, especially given the role they've played in fucking with the region and the West as the #1 state sponsor of terrorism in the world.

A preemptive US attack on North Korea was considered in 1994 when it was discovered that Pyongyang was producing plutonium at its Yongbyon nuclear complex but the plans were rejected ultimately on the grounds that they would spark all-out war on the Korean peninsula and result in a projected 1 million deaths. I don't believe there are/were any countries in Central or South America that have anything like the kind of pre-2003 rogue status of Saddam's Iraq with a bunch of recent transgressions and subsequent UN resolutions in place to justify military intervention.

There would probably be just as much to gain in drumming up false accusations against Chavez circa 03 and invading Venezuela.

You say "false accusations" but 15 countries signed UN resolution 1441, (including Russia, China, and France - the main suppliers of Iraq's arms), indicating that they all accepted Iraq possessed, sought, and continued constructing weapons of mass destruction whilst refusing to comply with prior disarmament obligations. It may have transpired that this was a bad call some time later but it wasn't that controversial then. Everyone thought Iraq had WMD, and Saddam later admitted that he'd deliberately kept up the pretence that he had such weapons for deterrent purposes against Iran and other foreign enemies.
(At no time was Venezulea comparable to this. Maybe Cuba would be closer, but even then you'd have to go back a few decades.)

It certainly had little to nothing to do with Al Qaeda in invading Iraq.

Well, yeah, like I said; the Iraq Liberation Act, which made regime change official US policy, was signed into law three years prior to 9/11.

 

[Pecker123]

Macheavelli believed the rule of a just tyrant was preferable to anarchy.

While there is truth there, Hussein was not a just tyrant. He was a murderous maniac whos egotism led to immense suffering.

Iraq today is a mess but Saddam is just to blame as the US.

Country was a powderkeg. Sunni. Shiia, tribalism. Its diverse.

 

[nhbfan8080]

.....
You say "false accusations" but 15 countries signed UN resolution 1441, (including Russia, China, and France - the main suppliers of Iraq's arms), indicating that they all accepted Iraq possessed, sought, and continued constructing weapons of mass destruction whilst refusing to comply with prior disarmament obligations. It may have transpired that this was a bad call some time later but it wasn't that controversial then. Everyone thought Iraq had WMD, and Saddam later admitted that he'd deliberately kept up the pretence that he had such weapons for deterrent purposes against Iran and other foreign enemies.
(At no time was Venezulea comparable to this. Maybe Cuba would be closer, but even then you'd have to go back a few decades.)

Well, yeah, like I said; the Iraq Liberation Act, which made regime change official US policy, was signed into law three years prior to 9/11.

1441 didn't say that there was WMD in Iraq. None of the dissenting countries like France/Germany believed it. What 1441 only said was that Iraq was in breach of 687 inspection/verification obligations. Now thats a far cry from Iraq is in possession of WMD.
http://usiraq.procon.org/view.answers.php?questionID=000875

I think that your misinterpretation of 1441 is caused by the intense pro-war media coverage. Just like how people take it for granted that the UN authorized no fly zones in Iraq but there really was no UN resolution giving the authority. It only was the US and a few allies including France at the time attacking Iraqi aircraft where they thought they did not belong.

Going back to my previous post, the NGIC report which showed that there were 'dangerous' and 'potentially lethal' WMDs found in Iraq were referring to found old and forgotten stocks of pre-1991 sarin/mustard gas.

 

[Irenaeus]

It wasn't better. But when viewed from a distance, it just seems like an awful amount of people have died to make it bad in a different way.

 

[Gregster]

1441 didn't say that there was WMD in Iraq. None of the dissenting countries like France/Germany believed it. What 1441 only said was that Iraq was in breach of 687 inspection/verification obligations. Now thats a far cry from Iraq is in possession of WMD

So....the possibility that Saddam had WMD was a "false accusation" that the Bush Administration "drummed up" to provide a pretext for invading Iraq, and a number of countries (France and Germany at very least, anway) knew this...but went ahead anyway and backed a resolution stating that Saddam hadn't abided his obligation to give up the weapons they didn't think he had, and was being offered one final chance to do so?

Personally, I'm inclined to think that if the UN Security Council issued a unaninous, across-the-board demand that Saddam verifiably give up or destroy certain types of weapons, it logically follows that they have at least a strong suspicion he still has them.

 

[computer fogie]

The US gov't was said to have exerted heavy pressure to convince other countries gov'ts to publicly agree with them. One Mexican official spoke about this, describing it as strong-arming. It's not a stretch or a "CT" to say that there was coercion going on, at the least.

The US gov't never actually had any solid evidence of Saddam having an active nuclear program or any viable chemical/biological agents. One can optimistically presume that these gross errors were all made in an earnest attempt to determine and report on Iraq's threat capabilities, of course. Or one can look at the players, their history, the truth that came out later, and who benefitted, and say "nope".

 

[Madmick]

Well, if you consider the stability of an established tyrannical, oppressive minority to be "better"...rock and a hard place.

 

[Amerikuracana]

Where I live, I am surrounded by people from Iraq. I see and talk to them every day. They seem to all say it was. I had one of my FB posts shared (by one of my Iraqi friends) talking about how everybody with a brain knew that they unfortunately needed a brutal dictator to keep the tribes from bashing each others heads in. He shared it to his page, and got a bunch of likes from his Iraqi family and friends.

 

[shera]

Maybe democracies don't work everywhere. Maybe someone like him is necessary for a country with Sunni, Shia, Kurds, Christians, Bedouins, etc. to work.

 

[computer fogie]

Where I live, I am surrounded by people from Iraq. I see and talk to them every day. They seem to all say it was. I had one of my FB posts shared (by one of my Iraqi friends) talking about how everybody with a brain knew that they unfortunately needed a brutal dictator to keep the tribes from bashing each others heads in. He shared it to his page, and got a bunch of likes from his Iraqi family and friends.

I think the Iraqis in your area are mostly Chaldeans (Christian Iraqis), aren't they? As someone else mentioned above, their life under Saddam could have been different from people of other religions and sects and stufflikethat.

 

[second sight]

Lazy Iraqi Police get motivational speech

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1GrdTakvl8

 

[CelticThunder]

Ha ha!

See? I tried to give you advice on leaving this alone and instead you chose to double down on your lunacy. In a hole and you keep on digging, babbling about Israel. It takes some wildly deluded narcissism to think a state would go to the trouble of paying someone to point out how silly you are.

Just a complete coincidence that you come into every thread regarding Palestine, Iraq, or anywhere in the Middle East and spout nothing but propaganda straight from the Israel foreign ministry. If you're not getting paid, then you are an even bigger stooge.

 

[Amerikuracana]

I think the Iraqis in your area are mostly Chaldeans (Christian Iraqis), aren't they? As someone else mentioned above, their life under Saddam could have been different from people of other religions and sects and stufflikethat.

that is correct.. But they, more than anybody, knew what people would have done to them over there without the threat of torture. My buddy Marvin (the worst smart ass you have ever met, strongest 160 lb guy I ever knew, however) would always tell me stories of getting rocks thrown at his head every other day, and that's why he always talked crap, because he had too over there to keep 'winning' in a weird way. But yes, Saddam prevented the different groups from acting on their hatred for each other. It does not say much for Iraq and its people that they needed that, but they did in fact need that.

 

[RTR ATL]

Just a complete coincidence that you come into every thread regarding Palestine, Iraq, or anywhere in the Middle East and spout nothing but propaganda straight from the Israel foreign ministry. If you're not getting paid, then you are an even bigger stooge.

 

[Marsupial]

Just a complete coincidence that you come into every thread regarding Palestine, Iraq, or anywhere in the Middle East and spout nothing but propaganda straight from the Israel foreign ministry. If you're not getting paid, then you are an even bigger stooge.

Yep, you got me. I post in threads related to topics I'm interested in, how suspicious!

Note that you occasionally swing by to offer up utterly unhinged and seethingly stupid anti-western soundbites but I don't think you're some Kremlin stooge. A deluded and credulous individual that soaks up propaganda from illiberal authoritarian crackpot sources in order to regurgitate it here, perhaps, but I know no organisation or state would pay (nor even care) for so cackhanded a disinfo op to be waged in so paltry a setting.

 

[djacobox372]

...and under Hitler, the trains ran on time.

Things were certainly more stable under Saddam's iron fist and golden AK-47. That is, if you can stomach the idea of "rape rooms" and such.

But now instead of one big rape room, there's thousands of little ones.

 

[Bumble_Bee_Tuna]

"Better" is subjective, so it's up to your own definition to make the call of whether Iraq was better off with hard ass tyrant like Saddam to keep radicals in check.

No, "better" is not subjective. You can objectively quantify things like civilization, with markets, schools, infrastructure, jobs and barbarism. And yes, it was better under Saddam.