lol...  In that hour or so would it include the fact that in the decade prior to the second invasion we had to go to war with that very same leader because he invaded another country?  Is that stabilizing?  Mass graves is stabilizing?  Retribution against assassination attempts with indiscriminate sweeps of ethnic and religious groups that he doesn't belong to.  That's stabilizing?  Using chemical weapons against his own people...  That's stabilizing?  

 

That's ridiculous on its face.  The man has admitted that he was no friend of our country, the man admitted that he was pursuing weapons to that end.  As Byron so adroitly pointed out, he was threatening economic terrorism against our dollar.  This is the guy that was such a stabilizing force?  Everyone was singing kumbaya by a fire with this guy?  I don't think so.  

 

It is true, security in that region requires a strong hand.  It does not however require the hand of the devil incarnate.  in the first 15 minutes of that hour you would find that in the case of Iraq, the surge strategy achieved relative stability and had we left a residual force of between 10-20k operators in the area that we could have swept ISIS off the face of the planet when they were in their infancy.  The Vaccum presented itself in the absence of an Army in country with the will to engage the enemy.  It didn't have to be the Ba'athist psychotic army, you just needed an army.  Precipitous withdrawal without consideration for facts on the ground is what created the vacuum.  

 

And if you honestly believe that Sadaam taking a bullet to the head from some Kurdish or shia sniper while his two sons went on a genocidal rampage through the country would have been a more sustainable or PC reality than post surge IRAQ before the pull out better have their head examined.  

 

As for the soviets, how the heck do you tie in a war (Korea) when you have nukes and the other side didn't?  The unwillingness to use overwhelming force with moral clarity has created what is probably the closest thing that we have to hell on earth in North Korea and allowed the spread of Communism through a large part of the world.  If you're actually advocating that allowing Hitler's brand of Fascism to spread across the globe then i don't know what to tell you.

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