Preventing a slaughter doesn't have to be in national interest...... But the right howled about Saddam "killing his own people" a decade or more after it happened...and then invaded the country...
This is just about the most morally bankrupt argument I can imagine.
That somehow, we ought to overlook Saddam's massacres of some 800,000 to 1,000,000 people over a period of years, solely because it is convenient to do so. Never mind that we also had legitimate national security interests in removing him that were an order of magnitude greater than the interest in removing Q.
According to The New York Times, "he [Saddam] murdered as many as a million of his people, many with poison gas. He tortured, maimed and imprisoned countless more. His unprovoked invasion of Iran is estimated to have left another million people dead. His seizure of Kuwait threw the Middle East into crisis. More insidious, arguably, was the psychological damage he inflicted on his own land. Hussein created a nation of informants — friends on friends, circles within circles — making an entire population complicit in his rule".[8] Others have estimated 800,000 deaths caused by Saddam not counting the Iran-Iraq war.[9] Estimates as to the number of Iraqis executed by Saddam's regime vary from 300-500,000[10] to over 600,000,[11] estimates as to the number of Kurds he massacred vary from 70,000 to 300,000,[12] and estimates as to the number killed in the put-down of the 1991 rebellion vary from 60,000[13] to 200,000.[11] Estimates for the number of dead in the Iran-Iraq war range upwards from 300,000.[14] |
