Don't let me see you fall into the simple-minded trap of saying, either America's motives must be totally pure, or they're totally cynical.
I didn’t say that America’s motives were purely cynical, I said that they had nothing to do with the welfare of the Iraqis. If our only objection to Saddam, or even our principal objection to Saddam, was that he was abusing his own people, we’d have done nothing, just as we are doing nothing to help most of the other abused people in the world.
It’s amusing to note, of course, that before the war, all we heard about was WMDs, and how, in your words, anything short of immediate invasion would “effectively cede control of the Gulf to Saddam”. After the war, when it became clear that, as many of us said all along, Saddam was in no position to take control of anything, all of a sudden the overwhelming motive became the liberation of the poor oppressed Iraqis.
That sort of shuffle begets a degree of cynicism |
