Are We Better than Saddam?

Several months ago seems like eons considering all the big news headlines of 2004. However, in March, I weighed in on the subject of the morass in Iraq, in response to a reader's question asking whether anyone thought Saddam was doing a good job? This was before we had a Democratic Party nominee with all the answers, before we installed an iron-fisted Interim Iraqi government to "annihilate" resistance. It was certainly before most of us had heard about the Abu Ghraib or Michael Moore's Fahrenheit.

As we go into the high-risk events leading up to (hopefully) the November elections, I thought I'd revisit my article, in case something has happened that might have changed my mind:

From March, 2004

The sad fact is we don't have to not whether Saddam was doing a good job, but whether we are doing a better one. Ideology aside, consider:

1. There are dictators all over the world. We could bankrupt the US ten times over removing them and get nowhere. We choose which battles we fight for non-humanitarian reasons. Gulf Wars I and II were no different.

2. In the grand scheme of things, we might have killed over 50,000 Iraqis between the two wars. If you accept that all lives are equal, we may have caused more deaths than Saddam, but the Pentagon made the exception in these wars not to bother to count the "enemy" casualties. "Evil" is relative. Saddam was terrible, but unleashing lawlessness and anarchy isn't a good thing to do to a society either.

3. The most atrocious acts of genocide and political killings in Iraq were not recent, but pre-Gulf War I, and largely with WMD provided by the West during the Cold War and the Iran-Iraq war.

4. Most of the infrastructure decay in the country was a result of the long period of UN sanctions after Gulf War I.

5. We won the ideological war against the Communist Block without direct military confrontation and major bloodshed against dictators with INFINITELY more might and a ready supply of WMD. They were a bigger threat, and every bit as oppressive and brutal. Why was Iraq so different? The West and Israel had and still has enough of a cache of WMD that it would be suicide on a regional scale for Iraq to make any preemptive strike. Even if there had been WMD, all intelligence noted that they were too well hidden to be reassembled and deployed quickly enough to avoid detection and counter-strike.

6. No immediate threat was established, and indeed, may not have existed in Iraq. Despite the bloodshed and no end in sight for the costs, there was no immediate threat, no terrorist links to Saddam and no WMD. As a power-hungry dictator, S.H. was much more interested in his own little power seat than any Holy Wars. True, he held a grudge against the Bushes and their clan, but the mass graves were full of the same religious zealots we see as the enemy. A Theocracy would be competition for S.H., which would not be tolerated.

7. The Gulf War II was at the expense of the War on Terror (an oxymoron), and indeed, may have sewn seeds of hatred and resentment throughout the Middle East. Osama bin Laden's hatred of the West was born out of Gulf War I. We can see tens of thousands of future bin Ladens in the eyes, minds and hearts of every hungry, homeless or orphaned child in Iraq and Afghanistan (the other forgotten war). Nothing in the New World Order abroad or Fatherland Security at home guarantees us more safety from 911-like terror in the future (as said by Bush and Ridge). Remember Bushs' "Peace Shield" just before 911? WMD are not and never will be the real threat. Loss of sovereignty, ignorance and clashes between irreconcilable religious ideological differences are the problem. We may have a future closer to Beirut and Jerusalem as the instability increases.

8. Can ANYONE honestly say with confidence, that a bloodless solution could NOT have been reached if we spent anything close to the $59-billion + $87-billion more on the PEACE PROCESS??? And NOBODY can say how much more it will cost in $$$ or lives before we "win" or give up in 10 years, like Vietnam.

9. George H W Bush was RIGHT by not invading Iraq in '91.

10. IMHO: we're doing a worse job than Saddam. The ends never justify the means, and tragically, American troops and Iraqis are dying for the greedy motives of a corrupt few.

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Looking back, the only thing that seems to have changed since I wrote this is that the price tag has gone up, and the 14 new permanent US military bases being constructed in the country might be a hint that it will even be costlier in lives, and the spiraling national debt for years to come.

- The Spymaster 

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