| From the Guardian, every bit as truthful as the NYT. |
Yes of course, everyone knows that Violent Islamic Extremism started post 1997.
Slap-bang in the middle of his currently awesome arc, lay a fortress of stability in the shape of Saddam's Iraq.
Ba'athist death squads = fortress of stability. How quaint
Saddam had tied down revolutionary Iran, the most potentially destructive force in the region, in an eight-year war, at the expense of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi casualties. Any Islamic terrorists found on Iraqi territory were summarily executed. The Middle Eastern oil that underpins our society, and therefore the values that our Prime Minister holds so dear, flowed freely into our refineries. Within Iraq itself, a secular state offered women opportunities unimaginable in nearby countries, and provided a standard of living far from unreasonable by the standards of the developing world.
Three objections were made to this state of affairs.
The first was that Saddam had expansionist ambitions. His annexation of Kuwait in 1990 was, however, rooted in a long-standing territorial claim based on the fact that Kuwait had been part of Basra province under the Ottomans and was only hived off under British colonial rule. Somewhat disconcertingly for Iraq's current liberators, this claim was revived in 2004 by none other than the US-appointed President of Iraq's Interim Governing Council.
When in doubtÂ…play the Ottoman Empire card.
The second objection was that Saddam was developing weapons of mass destruction. Why he stopped doing so, we shall perhaps never know, but when he had such weapons, he chose to use them against Iranian armed forces and Iraq's own dissident Kurds, rather than for any purpose that threatened the wider world.
WMDs are so much more pleasant when used for regional conflicts and suppressing your own citizens.
| And who cares about Iranians or Iraqi dissidents anyways? Not the Guardian. |
| Alternately, it might have caused Israel's destruction, but again, who at the Guardian cares about the filthy Zionists? |
Not so sure about that one Bub.
| Perhaps if they'd shut up for a while Dubya could get on with it. |
| It does only if you believe in human rights and that human rights are for all people, not just Y'urp-peon newspaper columnists. |
Naturally…they’re not exactly beacons of liberty but one only has to look at the “stability” of Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Syria to prove his point.
| The alternative would be to let the people go their own ways, but it's not surprising that the grandchildren of British imperialists would miss that possibility ... |
Now thereÂ’s a Dictators boiler-plate if you ever saw one.
| It might not be impossible, but who says it's desirable? |
| Except for the folks sent to the gulags, they had a real hard time managing to flourish in the corrective labor camps in the Kolyma, at least if you read a certain Mr. A. Solzhenitsyn. |
| But apparently not teach us. |
| Because what they got wasn't capitalism but gangsterism. It's interesting: the Bolsheviks taught that capitalists were gangsters, and Vlad Putin is doing everything he can to prove them right. |
| So says a safely ensconced British newspaper columnist who's never seen a Chinese labor camp, and who certainly doesn't care about the Chinese people. |
Saddam offered his people a harsh deal. Yet, their lives were at risk only if they chose to challenge his authority.
| Or if their brother, husband, daughter, second cousin, or member of a neighboring clan did. Or if they were Shi'a. Or Kurdish. Other than that, nope, Saddam never bothered anyone. |
If Saddam were still in power, he would have stopped this happening. Iraq's dissidents would have paid a price, but the rest of us would be a lot better off.
| And there you have it -- it's not about the Iraqi people, their right to be free, to realize their dreams, their human rights, it's all about the author -- HIS right to be better off. |
| Hogwash: the world has cause to ululate. |
R.J. Rummel