Irvine511 said:
listen, in some ways, it's all very simple.
the idea of taking out Saddam Hussein is not a new one. it had been discussed since the end of Gulf War 1 within the intelligence community and the military community. a policy of containment and sabre-rattling defined the 1990s, and in a weakened state, most thought it best to contain Saddam rather than confront him. further, while there were many strategic benefits to taking out Saddam, there were enormous risks in taking him out -- the cauldron of ethnic violence being just one of them -- and many saw some strategic advantages to keeping him in power as he effectively contained Iran.
the debate went backwards and forwards, but most came to the conclusion that the risks involved in taking out SH outweighed the potential benefits.
then 9-11 happened, and the Bush administration -- filled with people from the AEI and the Project for a New American Century -- manipulated this national tragedy to create a sense of crisis and urgency and overstate the danger SH presented to individual Americans. this is where the WMD issue came into being -- no talk about persian gulf oil, regional stability, arab democracy, etc., was going to be able to convince Joe and Jane American to send their sons and daughters to Iraq to die. thus, we had Cheney and Scooter driving across the Potomac every Wednesday in 2002 to check in on the CIA analysts (this is well documented) and how their "assessments" of the threat was coming along.
and you know what then happened.
and it turns out that the skeptics of the removal of SH were correct. what has happened has not justified his removal. we have a worse situation today than we did in 2001, and there's been tremendous damage to US soft and hard power as the US sits at it's lowest standing internationally since the late 1970s. Bush is no Truman; Bush is the flip side of Carter -- where Carter's passivity emasculated the US, Bush's belligerance has made us fall on our own sword.
and, tragically, the biggest crises facing the planet -- global AIDS, global warming, Israel/Palestine, NoKo, genocide in Africa -- are precisely the issues that would benefit most from effective US engagement. the US, for all it's myriad faults, has been a force for good in the world, and it may be once again. but the damage done to the US by this foolish invasion and years of now laughable bellicosity will take decades to undo.
Early on, it is true that most people supported containment. It was felt that given the defeat that Saddam suffered in 1991, he would never again challenge the West and would likely be gone within 5 years, replaced by a more moderate Sunni leader with no hostile intentions towards Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. Initially, Saddam complied with the weapons inspectors and the dismantlement of his WMD capability. But Saddam's behavior in regards to disarmament changed in the late 1990s until finally he ended all cooperation. In addition, the country's that had initially supported the sanctions and weapons embargo slowly started to break them.
By 2000-2002, a situation had developed where Saddam was in total violation of the disarmament issue he had agreed to comply with, plus the sanctions and weapons embargo, so vital to containing Saddam had crumbled. If Saddam had not complied with the UN Ceacefire Agreement in March 1991 and it was viewed that sanctions and a weapons embargo would not be possible, US forces which were only 100 miles south of Baghdad at that time would have moved in on the capital.
The point here is that you could only avoid the need for regime change if Saddam cooperated fully with disarmament of WMD and the sanctions and weapons embargo remained in place. Without those two factors, you run the risk of repeating August of 1990 given that so few US troops could be stationed on the ground there on a permanent basis. Sending 150,000 troops to Kuwait and Saudi Arabia in late 1994 was far more than just sabre rattling, but a response to a serious potential risk to US national security. The level of bombing done by the Clinton administration in late 1998 on Iraq is not something you do to a country that is weak and not a threat as so many liberals claim.
Without Saddam's compliance plus the crumbling of the containment regime, the only way to insure security was regime change. Containment can't work when its key components are no longer in place.
Joe and Jane America actually realize that there are threats to the United States that go well beyond simply protecting US borders unlike many democrats and liberals. Thats why they supported the largest deployment of US troops anywhere in the world since World War II in 1990/1991. Thats why they supported the 1991 Gulf war, despite the fact that the vast majority of Democrats did not support that war. Thats why Joe and Jane America re-elected George Bush in 2004. It is only the difficulties of a long nationbuilding and counterinsurgency task plus the Democrats carefully cherry picked attempts to undercut the need for the war, that have turned public opinion against it at the current time which is what Sunni Insurgents and Al Quada want to see.
The situation for fundamental US security concerns in the Persian Gulf, the security of oil in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, is better than it has been in decades and far better than it was in 2001 when Saddam had 430,000 troops, 2,700 tanks, 2,000 Armored Personal carriers, 2,500 artillery pieces, over 300 combat aircraft, thousands of unaccounted for stocks of WMD, virtually no effective sanctions or weapons embargo preventing him from starting to re-arm his military with new weapons. You must look at the situation from the perspective of defending Kuwait, the country that Saddam's invasion caused the largest deployment of US troops anywhere in the World since World War II. Kuwaits ability to defend itself from any hostile element within Iraq has never been this good. No hostile element inside Iraq, unlike Saddam's military capability in 2001, even has a fraction of the combat strength required for a cross border invasion of Kuwait.
US led alliances have remained intact and continue to help throughout the world. The idea that US "soft and hard power" is at its lowest point since the 1970s is a delusion. Country's all over the world continue to cooperate with the United States on a wide range of issues. International trade, Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan as well as helping victims of natural disasters, all have elements and levels of interational cooperation and engagement that did not exist in the 1970s. The world community has never shown the level of unity about Iranian nuclear activities that it is currently showing.
Addressing global warming, aids in Africa, genocide in Africa and many other issues can only be done by the United States and the world community from a position of security and prosperity. A severe economic depression caused by an oil disruption in the Persian Gulf or some other disaster would prevent the United States and the world from helping these other issues. Only a United States that remains strong and secure will be able to provide help and solutions to many of the worlds humanitarian problems. These are all important issues, but US national security and global economic security come before them, because without them, helping out would be impossible.
