| There is plenty of rhetoric against the United States, vowing vengeance for the first Gulf War. There are known designs for regional hegemony, and, as part of his party doctrine, the ultimate goal of an Arab ascendancy to challenge the West. Germany was not working against the US either, but at some point, people got a pretty clear idea that confrontation was inevitable. Of course, we could have let Britain go down, it would have without Lend- Lease, for certain. We could let Saddam dominate the Middle East, destroy Israel, and probably annihilate the Kurds and Shi'ites, but it is not the kind of world we care to live in. It made the most sense not to leave him in power, but to take him out while it was pretty easy to do so. |
