Ideologies are what we war against. Nazism had a blatant goal of conquest. Communism had a blatant goal of global insurgency and conquest. Imperial Japan had a vision of Asian Empire. Islamo-Fascism has a vision of global Jihad that will never end until everyone is Muslim.
All of these ideologies, in their fledgling state, are far easier to destroy or neutralize, than they will be after they are permitted to consolidate their gains.
I'm not really certain that Osama's vision is to convert everyone to Islam, but let's suppose that it is--Saddam had nothing to do with that. It wasn't his vision. If anything, he was about as opposed to that as any Moslem could be (he had his own delusions of grandeur, IMO). If anything, Saddam was an Arab ally against Osama and his crew. Now, please don't try to twist that into saying that I "support" Saddam. But--facts are facts.
When you add the above to the other points you make in your post about stateless actors, then you get better reasons to NOT invade Iraq and depose Saddam than to get rid of him. I don't deny that there are plenty of people who would like to attack the US again, even using WMDs, if they can get ahold of them. I look at the world today and believe that there are a lot more people today who would like to do that--or who would sympathize with this sort of attack--than there were on Sept 12, 2001. If military actions should be judged by whether or not they successfully accomplish political goals, then our military actions have been, so far, a miserable failure. |
