What exactly was wrong about overthrowing Saddam?

I am no expert on the situation, guess that applies to everyone else here.

My take on this situation is simple, Blair I actually believed did what he thought was right based on the information he was given. Did he make mistakes ? hell yes, but I am not sure anyone could have predicted the outcome.

As for how the aftermath was dealt with, again, they were trying to deal with an unfolding situation that was out of control. We have a culture of blaming people in hindsight, for me, I don't consider Blair an evil person.. misguided by the information he was given, maybe, but not an evil person.

Hindsight is amazing, it allows the general public to act like they know all the answers.

weisses wrote: »

What Tyranny did Europe endure after Hitler ?

Quite a lot of Europe had to endure Stalin.

rjpf1980 wrote: »

Saddam was a violent psychopath who butchered hundreds of thousands of his own people.

Yes and do you also know he was supported by the US and Britain.
For instance do you know that the US supplied him with reconnaissance photos during Iran/Iraq war.
Of course Saddam was always suspicious and rightly so.
After all hadn't old Ollie North, using Irish passport, being doing deals with Iran.

rjpf1980 wrote: »

Why are people still hanging on about the supposed injustice of overthrowing him?

If he had not been overthrown in 2003 he and his sons would still be in power ruling the Iraqi people with brutal savagery.

100,000 people marched through the streets of Dublin in opposition to his overthrow.

It beggars belief that Bush and Blair are called war criminals for overthrowing Saddam and giving democracy to millions of Iraqis and fighting Islamic extremist savages who attempted to destroy that democracy.

Obama against all advice withdrew all US troops from Iraq which led a stabilized country to collapse once again when attacked by ISIS.

The only future the Middle East has is when the dictators are gone and the terrorists are defeated. We all know this. Why then was the Iraq War so wrong?

Please explain.

Stop drinking the Republican/Fox News koolaid.

If the US were so interested in democracy then why not invade some other country run by despot ?
Why not invade when Saddam actually gassed the Kurds or why did they leave him butcher the Shias in Southern Iraq after he had been kicked out of Kuwait.
After all they were still massed just across the border in Kuwait and Saudi.

And if the US were so interested in helping Iraq why disband all organs of state and just rush to protect the oil ministry.
They needed the army to remain in place to ensure stability, instead they just broke it up.

It was done on lies and they had absolutely no idea on what to do once he was removed bar give their cronies in Haliburton lucrative contracts.

I actually don't know why I am answering your infantile reasoning.

FTA69 summed it up perfectly.

The fact that you actually believe the US and Britain brought democracy and stability is laughable.
And even worse that that is the reason they invaded in the first place.

BTW there were no problems with Islamic extremist in Iraq pre-invasion because Saddam either imprisoned or executed them.
The US created them.

Likewise with Libya and Syria.
What you and the likes of Bush and Blair fail to understand is that removing these dictators lets the genie out of the bottle.
The inter tribal hatreds and inter religious (even between different sects in islam) hatred boil over.
All the pent up hatred is released and you get one side seeking revenge for the past.

Also when the fook are people in the West going to cop on that our version of democracy and islam, devout islam especially, are incompatible bedfellows.

rjpf1980 wrote: »

Was WW2 about democracy and the Holocaust of the Jews? The Americans and Russians were involved on an imperialistic carve up of the globe after the European powers ate each other alive in two world wars.

I'm still glad Hitler was gone and Western democracies survived. For Third World countries it made little difference because they were still ruled and are still ruled by colonial powers although now indirectly.

It was still worth it.

Who cares if the power elites had selfish motives for the Iraq War? Saddam is dead an gone and Iraq had a chance at developing into a proper democracy until the moron Obama withdrew the troops the greatest disaster since the American withdrawal from Vietnam.

Do you have a clue ?

Ehh Hitler invaded countless countries including USSR.
That is why they fought.
And yes some of the countries invaded by Hitler were democracies, others were not.
Japan directly attacked the US so that is why they ended up in the war, although they were involved indirectly long before that.

You can't compare Hitler to Saddam, unless you want to just take to the level of "they were both evil and bad." :rolleyes:

I won't even bother getting dragged into a discussion on South East Asia, although it is yet another example of the US foreign policy not having a clue about people they are fighting.
The US foreign policy broke down to level of "shure aren't they all slanted eyes commies" rather than they are Khmers, Lao, Vietnamese and Chinese and they often don't agree or like each other.
Similar in Iraq where they just label them "Iraqi" rather than see the differences between Arab, Kurd, Shia, Sunni, Christian, Yazidis, etc.

smash wrote: »

Even though it does sound like conspiracy theory stuff, there's some fascinating videos and articles about this. Here's a quote:

Probably because it is, you can check my posting history for a debunk of some of this stuff. The TLDR is a country of 6 million with the oil reserves of Nigeria and the gold reserves of Thailand, is not magically going to cause some great revolution in world economics.

lertsnim wrote: »

Quite a lot of Europe had to endure Stalin.

Off Topic:

Don't forget Franco and Salazar in Spain and Portugal.

If Germany had been happy with Austria and the Sudetenland Germany would have stayed a dictatorship just like Spain and Portugal until something broke internally.

Now that would have been an "interesting" three-sided Cold War.

This is a fun read. By 'fun' I mean tragic. It's an excerpt from a book on the west's relationship with Iraq. This bit is Bush snr's decision re Saddam.



"But the Bush administration didn't just turn its back; it actually aided Saddam to suppress the Intifada.

The Uprising Smashed

When Saddam's brutal counter-attack against the rebellions began, the order was given to American troops already deep inside Iraq and armed to the teeth not to assist the rebellion in any way -- though everyone knew that they were condemning the Intifada to an awful defeat. Thanks to their high-flying reconnaissance planes, U.S. commanders would observe the brutal process as it occurred.

At the time, Rocky Gonzalez was a Special Forces warrant officer serving with U.S. troops in southern Iraq. Because he spoke Arabic, he was detached to serve with the Third Brigade of the 101st Infantry when the ground war began. There were about 140 men in his unit, which was stationed at Al Khadir on the Euphrates, just a few kilometers from Kerbala and Najaf.

Rocky was one of the few Americans who could actually communicate with the Iraqis. When the Intifada erupted, the Americans prompted the rebels to raid the local prison in Kerbala and free the Kuwaitis who were being held there. "We didn't think there was going to be a lot of bloodshed," said Gonzalez, "but they executed the guards in the prison." Prior to the uprising, the rebels had also been feeding intelligence to the Americans on what Saddam's local supporters were up to.

From their base, Rocky and his units watched as Saddam's forces launched their counterattack against the rebel-held city. Thousands of people fled toward the American lines, said Gonzalez. "All of a sudden, as far as the eye could see on Highway Five, there was just a long line of vehicles, dump trucks, tractors -- any vehicle they could get -- coming to us in streams."

"The rebels wanted aid, they wanted medical treatment, and some of the individuals wanted us to give them weapons and ammunition so they could go and fight. One of the refugees was waving a leaflet that had been dropped by U.S. planes over Iraq. Those leaflets told them to rise up against the regime and free themselves."

"They weren't asking us to fight. They felt they could do that themselves. Basically they were just saying 'we rose up like you asked us, now give us some weapons and arms to fight.'"

The American forces had huge stocks of weapons they had captured from the Iraqis. But they were ordered to blow them up rather than turn them over to the rebels. "It was gut-wrenching to me," said Gonzalez. "Here we were sitting on the Euphrates River and we were ordered to stop. As a human being, I wanted to help, but as a solider I had my orders."

Ironically, according to a former U.S. diplomat, some of the arms that were not destroyed by American forces were collected by the CIA and shipped to anti-Soviet rebels in Afghanistan, who at the time were being clandestinely backed by the U.S.

A Shiite survivor of the uprising later said he had seen other American forces at the river town of Nassiriya destroy a huge cache of weapons that the rebels desperately needed. "They blew up an enormous stock of arms," he said. "If we had been able to get hold of them, the course of history would have been changed in favor of the uprising, because Saddam had nothing left at that moment."

Indeed, Saddam's former intelligence chief, General Wafiq al-Samarrai, later recounted that the government forces had almost no ammunition left when they finally squelched the revolt. "By the last week of the intifada," he said, "the army was down to two hundred and seventy thousand Kalashnikov bullets." That would have lasted for just two more days of fighting.

In his autobiography, General Schwarzkopf, without giving details, alludes to the fact that the American-led coalition aided Saddam to crush the uprising. According to his curious reasoning, expressed in another interview, the Iraqi people were not innocent in the whole affair because "they supported the invasion of Kuwait and accepted Saddam Hussein."

Iraqi survivors of the Intifada also claimed that U.S. forces actually prevented them from marching on Baghdad. "American helicopters landed on the road to block our way and stopped us from continuing," they said. "One of the American soldiers threatened to kill us if we didn't turn back." Another Shiite leader, Dr. Hamid al-Bayatti, claimed that the U.S. even provided Saddam's Republican Guards with fuel. The Americans, he charged, disarmed some resistance units and allowed Republican Guard tanks to go through their checkpoints to crush the uprising. "We let one Iraqi division go through our lines to get to Basra because the United States did not want the regime to collapse," said Middle East expert Wiliam Quandt.

The U.S. officials declined even to meet with the Shiites to hear their case. As Peter Galbraith said, "These were desperate people, desperate for U.S. help. But the U.S. refused to talk to any of the Shiite leaders: the U.S. Embassy, Schwarzkopf, nobody would see them, nor even give them an explanation."

The stonewalling continued even when evidence that Saddam was using chemical weapons against the rebels emerged. "You could see there were helicopters crisscrossing the skies, going back and forth," Rocky Gonzalez said. "Within a few hours people started showing up at our perimeter with chemical burns. They were saying, 'We are fighting the Iraqi military and the Baath Party and they sprayed us with chemicals.' We were guessing mustard gas. They had blisters and burns on their face and on their hands, on places where the skin was exposed," he said. "As the hours passed, more and more people were coming. And I asked them, 'Why don't you go to the hospital in Kerbala,' and the response was that all the doctors and nurses had been executed by the Iraqi soldiers, 'so we come to you for aid.'"

One of the greatest concerns of coalition forces during Desert Storm had been that Saddam would unleash his WMD. U.S. officials repeatedly warned Iraq that America's response would be immediate and devastating. Facing such threats, Saddam kept his weapons holstered -- or so the Bush administration led the world to believe.

Rocky's suspicion that Saddam did resort to them in 1991 was later confirmed by the report of the U.S. Government's Iraq Survey Group, which investigated Saddam's WMD after the U.S.-led invasion in 2003 and concluded that Saddam no longer had any WMD. Almost universally ignored by the media, however, was the finding that Saddam had resorted to his WMD during the 1991 uprising. The "regime was shaking and wanted something 'very quick and effective' to put down the revolt." They considered then rejected using mustard gas, as it would be too perceptible with U.S. troops close by. Instead, on March 7th, 1991 the Iraqi military filled R-400 aerial bombs with sarin, a binary nerve agent. "Dozens of sorties were flown against Shiite rebels in Kerbala and the surrounding areas," the ISG report said. But apparently the R-400 bombs were not very effective, having been designed for high-speed delivery from planes, not slow-moving helicopters. So the Iraqi military switched to dropping CS, a very potent tear gas, in large aerial bombs.

Because of previous U.S. warnings against resorting to chemical weapons, Saddam and his generals knew they were taking a serious risk, but the Coalition never reacted. The lingering question is why."

from


http://www.alternet.org/story/49864/how_george_h.w._bush_helped_saddam_hussein_prevent_an_iraqi_uprising

ArtSmart wrote: »

This is a fun read. By 'fun' I mean tragic. It's an excerpt from a book on the west's relationship with Iraq. This bit is Bush snr's decision re Saddam.

"But the Bush administration didn't just turn its back; it actually aided Saddam to suppress the Intifada.

That's an interesting read alright, but the reality is simply this, had America backed the intefada they encouraged, we'd only be where we are today except a little faster.
We saw in the wake of the Arab Spring how quickly shady Islamists, ethnic and religious tensions caused any filcker of optimism to be quashed and the reality of civil war amongst these parties errupt as they all vied for power.
The reality was that an 'outbreak of Jeffersonian democracy' was never going to happen in states where tribal, religious and ethnic tensions had been simmering under the surface for decades if not hundreds of years, it was always going to come to this sooner or later.

.

rjpf1980 wrote: »

And why not? America would be on the road to Third World status if it didn't defend it's vital interests. If that means blood then so be it.

Care to list these "vital interests" that America was "defending" when it illegally invaded Iraq?