"If we'd have had the foresight to get rid of Adolf back in the '30's millions of lives would've been saved. We didn't. And I'm sure there were a few liberals back then who agreed we should let Europe worry about Hitler."
A couple things about this comment; First, I've always found the Saddam-Adolf comparison way off base. Second, that "liberals" comment is pretty typical of the right-wing propaganda machine that seems bent on rewriting history to blame "liberals" (hence Democrats) for every damn thing that ever went wrong in the world. I read that you wanted to remove that "liberals" thing in a later post, hats off to you for that Dale, but see how easy it is to slip into that "liberals are the root of all evil" mode. There exists a bunch of revisionist lunatics in this country that want us to believe McCarthyism was really just some heavy duty form of patriotism. Hey, if folks start getting on board with that it's time to pack up the suitcase, call Gene, and have him pick me up on the way to Montreal.
"They were wrong back then and, who knows what would've happened to the world if the left had gotten their way and we left Saddam in power. Maybe nothing. Maybe WWIII."
It seems Saddam starting WWIII was about as likely as you and me winning the lottery on the same day. Saddam may have been a lot of things but he was not Adolf Hitler and Iraq was no Germany. If you are worried about WWIII getting rolling perhaps you should aim your concern at North Korea or our current administrations deal selling bunker busters to Israel to aim directly at Iran. Yup, they were thinking peace process when they did that.
" Personally, I've always believed "an ounce of pervention is worth a pound of cure." Thousands of innocent people have now died. Hundreds of American soldiers have died too. I think we can all agree it makes us all sick."
Amen to all that.
"This whole thing was a gamble; do we do nothing and hope for the best? Or do we remove a dangerous tyrant and eliminate any chance of tens of thousands of deaths and at the same time creating a democracy in the middle east?"
The thing is Saddam was not killing tens of thousands of his people at the time we attacked him. Remember all his worst human rights abuses were some 20 years old. We had him well contained and we were probably doing more harm to his people with sanctions than he was. The fact it was a gamble is why it is so open to debate. It's also why the right wingnuts (I'm not including you in that group Dale) shouldn't complain so much when the decision is called into question. It would seem there were a lot better gambles out there we should have concerned ourselves with. Saddam just happened to be sitting on a giant oil reserve and had already been sold to the American public as the devil 20 years ago. I mean, fine support the war with Iraq but don't try and human rights me on it...it was all about the oil...why can't we just say that?
