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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Dennis O'Bell who wrote (116279)	10/6/2003 10:43:05 AM
From: Sun Tzu	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 281500

True enough there are certain people who will only understand force. I also agree with you that the world is a better place without Saddam than with him. But I don't think we did the right thing and in the right way. There are many brutal dictators around the world. And unless it is your position that we should send troops to topple all of them (or as many of them as we can) then saying that Saddam was bad guy is not justification for the war. Since you used a local crime case to make your point, let me mention another one that I know about. In NYC, we had a prostitution problem around the 42nd street. Giuliani used a lot of heavy handed tactics to "clean it up". On the face of it he succeeded as you no longer see the kind of scenes you used to see. But in reality he made the problem worse. Putting aside arguments for legalization of prostitution and freedom of expression and so on, all that Giuliani accomplished was to spread the hookers around the 5 boroughs. So now rather than having one concentrated ugly looking spot that was kept to itself, a lot more people have hookers in their neighborhoods. It was kind of like getting rid of the dirt by spreading it all over your home. The other effect of these by-laws was that some sex shops started to rent out space for off-Broadway acting and included other merchandise just so that they can meet the letter of the law for selling their same old merchandise. In short, Giuliani gave the appearance of being effective against fighting sex trade while the truth remained to the contrary. Let's get back to Iraq and Saddam. Is there any reason to believe Saddam was an imminent threat? Is there any reason to believe he could not have been bribed to police the terrorist for us in exchange to minor concessions on our part? Did we do this the best way? Was GW truthful to us in his reasoning for the urgent necessity of the war? Before you answer, keep in mind that as brutal and ruthless as Saddam was (is?) he was very logical in his policies (it is just that he had no conscience and no regards for human life). So I don't see why he could not have been bargained with.