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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices
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i-node
To: RMF who wrote (792270)6/29/2014 1:02:48 AM
From: Tenchusatsu1 Recommendation  Read Replies (1) of 1576614
 
RMF,
What if Saddam had never gone into Kuwait? Would he be the enemy now or maybe an ally against Iran?
It's hard to say, but none of this second-guessing changes what we should or shouldn't do with regard to Iraq or the Middle East in general. All it does is set up context for how most everything we do (or don't do) has unintended consequences.

It's like saying we shouldn't have taken out Osama bin Laden because we once supported him as an ally against the Soviets.
That rivalry has been going on for centuries. But when we went in there we flipped everything upside down.
Upside-down or right side up, it doesn't matter. Bush did not start the rivalry.

Like I said, we probably should have anticipated all of this and made damn sure that the new democracy we're trying to form there actually treated everyone with equal rights and due process. The trick is making all the factions that make up Iraq want that as well. That turned out to be much tougher than we thought.

But to claim that things were remotely "right side up" when Saddam was in power is worse (in my opinion) than to naively believe that these factions will simply give up their rivalries in favor of Western-style democracy. I'm not saying the latter is OK, but I'd rather not call anything evil good no matter what your intention may be.

Tenchusatsu
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