What you support, you lose the right to condemn later- especially when you throw your eyes to heaven and wring your hands and pretend you didn't know about the crimes, or worse yet, try to use them to justify even more crimes. That is the worst kind of behavior. If you are going to support a butcher, don't try to pretend you didn't. We, the US, supported many butchers. The mass graves are most certainly from the period when we gave Iraq our full support and we KNEW about the killings. oh dear oh dear. That doesn't look very good, does it?
The problem, as I see it, is that we supported Saddam because he was the devil we knew- and we backed the devil we knew. When you make a deal with the devil you lose some of your soul. We have lost any credibility in really being against WMD by supporting Saddam totally when he was using them against his own people, and against the Iranians (and we were glad he did). Further, we cannot on the one hand ignore the UN and run our own wars, and on the other try to use the UN like a puppet. Interestingly that is exactly what we are trying to do, so I guess we CAN do it- but it is wrong. Not to mention our own interesting research in the WMD department- but of course, we think we're the *good* guys. The problem is, every country thinks they are that, and no country is.
Nowhere near as many people have been killed in Iraq- unless you follow the silly numbers that count the Iran-Iraq war (and even then you are probably about a million shy of the mark killed in AFrica- and the displacement number!!! AS you yourself mentioned, huge refugee populations)- and of course we were fully behind the Iran - Iraq war project (rah rah). Because of the arms for hostages deal, we actually armed both sides in that conflict. We are a good merchant of death. Let us see if we can do anything about peace. I doubt we can, but perhaps, when Bush is gone, something better will come along.
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