That logic cant stand. You cant have a necessary evil that isnt a staunch ally in the region.


That argument woyld make sense if after 9 11 he was offering intell on radical elements, pledging not to harbor terrorists and complying with un inspections. Then the argument could be made that his behavior in country was a necessary evil.


Instead what u had was a suni state actor who had proven he was a.) a sociopath b.) would use chemical weapons and c.) wouldnt comply with non proliferation.


This romantacizing of sadaam is revisionism. He freely admitted that he had no intent of complying with the un, hadnt followed all directives would pursue nuclear wrapons and had already threatened the stability of the petro dollar which is part of why this green stuff in our pockets has value and the effects of which could be devastating.


Security in that region does take a strong hand nut history has proven that outsourcing that security to satan doesnt work out in the long run.

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U.S. Apache helicopter safely escorts ISIS convoy into Syria:

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q76dpnxcYNw

 

Have the facts been established about this? The question is if this is our military, or an Apache made by us and confiscated from/abandoned/by the U.S. trained and supplied Iraqi military. Neither scenario is good, but the implications are much different.

 

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If something can corrupt you, you're corrupted already.
- Bob Marley


 

That logic cant stand. You cant have a necessary evil that isnt a staunch ally in the region.


That argument woyld make sense if after 9 11 he was offering intell on radical elements, pledging not to harbor terrorists and complying with un inspections. Then the argument could be made that his behavior in country was a necessary evil.


Instead what u had was a suni state actor who had proven he was a.) a sociopath b.) would use chemical weapons and c.) wouldnt comply with non proliferation.


This romantacizing of sadaam is revisionism. He freely admitted that he had no intent of complying with the un, hadnt followed all directives would pursue nuclear wrapons and had already threatened the stability of the petro dollar which is part of why this green stuff in our pockets has value and the effects of which could be devastating.


Security in that region does take a strong hand nut history has proven that outsourcing that security to satan doesnt work out in the long run.

An hour or so of research into the dynamics of the Middle East cuts the head off of your whole argument. I doubt you'd find many people in America or abroad who would argue that Saddam Hussein was a great leader and friend of freedom. What was true (and the rise of ISIS all but proves it) is that Hussein's government was a stabilizing influence in the region that stood as counter to the increasingly radicalized Iran and Syria. Consider that if we hadn't deposed Saddam, there wouldn't have been a flow of Sunnis into ISIS. At least, not nearly the steady flow there is today. Saddam's regime could and would have fallen in time, but by not allowing it to happen naturally, we created the power vacuum that enabled ISIS to become what they are today and gave them yet more reason to hate us.

 

As the primary evidence against your point, take the WWII-era Soviet Union. We knew that Stalin was a madman, a sociopath and an all-around danger to humanity, but we gave them money, support and weapons (including planes, some of which they would later reverse-engineer and build to stand against us in the 1950's) because we recognized that they were capable of doing so much damage on Germany's back end that it would make it possible for us to invade from the front. In many respects, that was America's greatest wartime alliance ever. The USSR accounted for 75% of German casualties. Given what happened over the next 45 years, I'm sure there was plenty of hand-wringing over the knowledge that we, in many ways, created the USSR juggernaut--there's that theme of us creating our own enemies again--but the truth of it is that without USSR help, the Allied Powers likely would have lost WWII.

 

Saddam falls into that same category. No one liked him, and no one particularly wanted to count him as anything close to an ally, but his presence stabilized the Middle East, and the world was better off with him in power than it is with him gone.

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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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