Bon_Clay said:
You did say they were our mess and responsibility, which I don't really agree with. As they never invaded and destroyed large amounts of their country I don't think the US should feel it has to save Pakistan from it current situation, only work with them to help the overall situation with global terrorism for everyone's benefit.
Which means stabilizing the country. Since the only reason it's been destabilized is because sizable parts of the Taliban and Al Qaeda fled over the border to invade Pakistan.
Ok saying that was completely unrelated to 9/11 was exaggerating, but I still don't think a full scale invasion of a country was a legitimate response to an act of terrorism rather than warfare.
And I agree. However, both Bush and Obama claim that Afghanistan is a "good war", and because most of the anti-war movement in the US was more about hate for Bush than consideration of legal concerns, their political leanings have largely forced them to muzzle themselves (lest their complaints assist the Republicans in returning to power).
Putting all these restriction and rules, including the embargo, on Iraq wasn't the best way to deal with it to begin with.
That was the UN's call, and done specifically because Iraq was not in compliance with the cease-fire terms. It was the UN's attempt to find a solution
other than re-invading Iraq and toppling the Hussein regime. Clearly that was not a solution, as a decade later there had been no significant progress in getting Hussein to comply.
According to anti-sanctions groups who wanted them lifted and the matter returned to normalcy, half a million Iraqis died because of the sanctions. The reality of course is that Hussein diverted food, money and material which were allowed through to the purpose of rebuilding his military --- which was also prohibited. Even the lessening of sanctions for the feeding of the populace, the "Food for Oil" program, merely resulted in the food money being squirreled away in huge caches, some of which were discovered during the 2003 invasion.
So just because the cease-fire and weapons bans allowed them to legally invade them, I don't think it was necessarily justified.
If a nation's government breaks a cease-fire, there is no cause for complaint when their opposition resumes hostilities. This is especially true in this instance, where so many of the terms were violated. Even the easy ones, like refusing to repatriate prisoners of war taken during Iraq's original invasion of Kuwait.
The US was the one who decided to enforce the punishment of breaking the terms, they had to try to convince other countries to join in on it.
The only nation on the UN Security Council which openly stated it would oppose such enforcement was France. Immediately prior to that, even France had signed on to a unanimous resolution giving Iraq a final deadline for compliance with UNR 687. It was only after this deadline had been breached, and the US sought a formal resolution for UN involvement in a new invasion, that France balked.
As it turned out, France had an under-the-table deal with the Hussein regime to develop 25% of Iraq's remaining undeveloped oilfields. Bit of the old
quid pro quo, which Iraq had indeed been trying with various other UN members in order to get their votes to lift the sanctions.
it still comes off as trying them trying to police the world.
Of course it was. So was the original 1991 Gulf War, whereby the UN (75% of its combat forces being provided by the US) ejected Iraq from Kuwait. Few people complained about that, and those who did were already using the "No Blood for Oil" line.
FYI, the same poll report which showed the US becoming a "pariah nation" over the 2003 invasion --- the Pew Research poll --- also showed large majorities believing that the oil was the real reason for the invasion in the first place, and the reason they opposed the war. Similarly large majorities nonetheless agreed Saddam Hussein should be removed from power.
Since the United States did not in fact seize the oil for itself --- either in 1991 or now --- the basis for mass world opposition to the invasion has been shown to be unsupported.
I wasn't trying to imply anyone said Saddam was directly part of the Taliban or behind 9/11. But the message people were given was basically, "its us versus the enemy in the war on terror"
Given that Hussein was known to have offered bin Laden sanctuary, and also that he provided cash and resources to terrorist groups (including the use of Iraqi land for training facilities), Hussein was indeed a proper target in that regard. However, if it had ONLY been his support for terrorists and he had NOT been in violation of the 1991 cease-fire terms, there would have been no invasion because he would not have stood out more than, say, Syria or Iran.
The terrorism aspect of Hussein's regime was a reason given in addition to his cease-fire violations, not vice-versa.
And then past the justification and reasons for initial invasions, the reason why the US has been in both regions so long eludes me.
Because we're fighting insurgents who hide amongst civilians, dress as civilians, and use civilians as human shields, not governments or professional militaries who only do the human shields bit and then only in very limited fashion by comparison. We have been trying to keep the civilian death toll down...if we didn't care about that, we'd have been doing to Iraq and Afghanistan what the Croatians did to the Balkans.
According to anti-war groups such as IraqBodyCount.org, some 100,000 Iraqi civilians have lost their lives by violence from 2003 to now (eight years of war). Most of that is actually death by insurgents, death of Iraqis who themselves were insurgents, and death caused by violence unrelated to military operations --- IBC makes notes of the cause of death in each case. Saddam Hussein, during peacetime, killed in excess of 1,000,000 Iraqis during his 25 years in power according to human rights groups around the world --- by purges, gassing, and gruesome political executions such as feeding them to his sons' zoo menagerie. That's an average of 40,000 dead Iraqis per year...in peacetime.
The number of years Saddam would have remained in power and unchecked if we hadn't invaded --- eight --- times the number of Iraqi civilian deaths he averaged each year --- forty thousand --- equals 320,000. The invasion of Iraq, barring some miraculous shift in Hussein's style of government, has resulted in the saving of over 200,000 lives.
I call that worth the effort.
