Wow. Someone on this topic has posted the dumbest thing he has ever posted on the entire forum.
I don’t think you give enough credit to some of the dumb things people have posted on the Compendium over the years.
Umm, don't forget that he didn't actually commit the murders. He hired them. And quite frankly, thats in the power of a president. If Bush wanted, he'd have you arrested by the FBI, have you Haebus Corpus taken away from you and then have you killed for whatever reason he wanted. Heck, he has the right to order a nuclear strike, have a soldier killed on the battle fields and heaps of crap.
Wrong sir, wrong. In America, we have Congress to prevent things like that. Hell, we have the Bill of Rights to protect our freedoms.
I would like to be able to agree with you, but your assessment is more idealistic than practical. Ever since September 11, the Republican Congress has entirely rejected its obligation to keep a check on the administration. Dubya could do no wrong, as far as they were concerned. In truth, he did
everything wrong. Many of us watched on with dismay as the Republicans steadfastly ignored that. Then you guys finally lost the elections, and started turning on one another to explain what had gone wrong. I'll tell you what went wrong: You actually believed all the lies whistled at you by pied pipers like Bill O’Reilly and James Dobson. Meanwhile, your leaders were whisking us off to Hell in a hand basket. Deficits, Plan B, Plan D, Katrina, Iraq…all that shit adds up.
I know history. Congressional oversight of an administration is always kinder and more tolerant when a single party is in control. Nonetheless, “kinder and more tolerant” is an understatement for these past few sessions’ neglect of their duty to uphold the Constitution. What Congress has shown us since 2001 is that we do
not have Congress to protect us from the dictatorial leanings of an administration. Nominally, and usually, we do, but when the ingredients are mixed just right, these checks and balances cease to function. In this case, we suffered a major terrorist attack during the rule of a single political party that happened to be dominated by religious fundamentalists. Presto. It might not be the only recipe, but we have hereby discovered a scenario under which the American democratic system fails. The direct repercussions of these past few years will ring on throughout most of our natural lives.
You know how I could go on about the dangers of religious fanatics. You believe it too, nightmare—just replace “Christian” with “Muslim.” But I’ll spare you yet another rendition of that tirade.
Umm, don't forget that he didn't actually commit the murders. He hired them. And quite frankly, thats in the power of a president. If Bush wanted, he'd have you arrested by the FBI, have you Haebus Corpus taken away from you and then have you killed for whatever reason he wanted. Heck, he has the right to order a nuclear strike, have a soldier killed on the battle fields and heaps of crap.
Despite the tactlessness of what you wrote, you raise some good points. The excesses of government that you attribute to Bush—nearly all true, by the way—account for people like Radical_Dreamer who are so wary of governmental authority over and pervasiveness in our lives.
I don’t share that wariness myself; I think a successful modern nation requires extensive government, and that a well-written national charter will insulate a good system against bad leadership and deleterious cultural movements. The United States has done this quite remarkably well in the past, within the limit of the context of history. Britain and northern Europe have done even better.
Nevertheless, whatever I might think, there are many who think differently, and the complaint you espouse above is at the root of much popular suspicion of government. So you do have a point there.
Where you do not have a point is to excuse whatever Saddam may have done by alleging that Bush has done worse. Bush
has done worse than Saddam, and, as of December 31, 2006, his Iraq war now claims more American deaths than even the full official death toll of September 11. This is to say nothing of the
hundreds of thousands of Iraqi deaths resulting from our bungled occupation, the destabilization of the entire Middle East, the permanent damage to American prestige, and our inconceivable financial losses that will ultimately burden every one of us. But be that as it may, a just society does not try to defend its arguments by the
tu quoque logical fallacy. Therefore, whatever Bush may have done is irrelevant in the determination of what penalty might have been just for Saddam.
Saddam did what he did. He may have been a dictator, but don't forget that 70% of Iraqi's supported him. The other 30% were retards who brought it upon themselves.
I don’t buy your statistics. However, I also don’t buy the more popular American vilification of him. All of this strikes me as propaganda. The fact of the matter is that, were dictatorship our concern, we could have picked from plenty of countries that had the tyrant bug worse than Iraq’s government. Ditto, were human rights abuses our concern, we would have had to invade quite the menagerie of failed countries before getting to Iraq—which itself was hardly a “failed country” prior to the first Gulf War—the point in time at which our fixation upon that nation began.
American critics of Saddam like to squawk about rape rooms, mustard gas, and acid vats, and for them that is the end of the discussion as to whether we should have removed him from power (and ultimately hanged him). But, as is typical of the right wing, this gross oversimplification, spiced with a dash of shameless prevarication, precludes such people from ever achieving a workable understanding of what Iraq was really like under Saddam.
So, even though I don’t agree with what you said, I like the point that you raise. People of good conscience must accept the unsavory truth that, yes, in all likelihood there was some serious crimes committed by the Iraqi government, but that not even the whole sum of these crimes taken at once was enough to justify the invasion of a sovereign nation. You have to weigh the crimes that occurred as a direct result of malice or incompetence at the highest levels of Iraq’s government, against everything else that Iraq was.
First of all, and most importantly, there was all of this seething sectarian fundamentalism, held in check by Saddam’s secular administration. That beast of Islamic fanatics, now unleashed, has proven far more ruinous to the lives, limbs, and livelihoods of the Iraqi people than Saddam’s government ever was. Could the United States possibly have quashed that Islamic fanaticism without a full-scale occupation and reconstruction effort not seen since the mid-twentieth century? We opened a real can of worms!
Likewise, not every misdeed in Iraq was at the command of Saddam Hussein. Much of it was not governmental at all. Of what was governmental, there was greater corruption in the lower levels of government—less opulent than Uday’s disgusting extravagances, but more relevant to the Iraqi people. This became evident in the aftermath of the war, when, once the central government broke down, Iraqi society collapsed into near oblivion. Again, this should have been a warning sign against invasion. Institutionalized ineptitude further down the chain of command cuts off the discussion of invasion, because it is more just in such a case to work the diplomatic channels and cooperate with the central government to institute reforms. If nothing else, we once again should have been prepared for a full-scale occupation and reconstruction effort. We weren’t. Bush not only encouraged Americans to spend more money during the war; he even cut taxes to help them do it. He did that
in wartime. In that regard, our decision to remove Saddam was particularly devastating not simply to Iraq but to the United States especially.
We could have saved hundreds of thousands of lives, and trillions of dollars, with a smarter Iraq policy. Saddam was not the depraved and perverted caricature that American propaganda made him out to be. Life in Iraq under him was more stable and prosperous, and liberal, than that of most of the rest of the Middle East, prior to the first Gulf War. Those Americans (and others) who try to imagine Iraq under Saddam and can see only rape rooms, mustard gas, and acid vats, are beholden to a fantasy concocted by the neoconservative movement, in cahoots with the Bush administration and the right-wing noise machine. The real Iraq under Saddam was a much better place than that.
Which leads me to a real truth: You are almost certainly wrong that that “30 percent” of Iraqis, whatever their true number may have been, brought their own misfortunes upon them by not supporting Saddam. Quite the contrary: The government probably disenfranchised those people. Some of them were no doubt oppressed, and a few really were tortured, abused, and so forth. It is a bit disgusting of you to blame them for the abuses of their own government.
However, as I pointed out, you are definitely right that Iraq under Saddam was better than many Americans realize—an inconvenient truth which delegitimizes our invasion of that country, and makes us implicitly responsible for all the chaos and death that has befallen Iraq since 2003.
Like I say from time to time, the real truth is always simple but only sometimes pleasant.
It's the same old thing. The powerful tyrants rule, and the weaker ones are hanged. Like in the second World War. Did Churchill hang at Nurnburg? Hardly.
That is a particularly intellectually vapid comparison. Churchill was many things, but he was never a “tyrant.” The poor fool—having served his purpose as Britain’s war champion—was voted out of office (quite peacefully) shortly after World War II.
A head of government is not automatically a tyrant. Your attention to classic Greek history, indeed, should remind you of the subtleties in the etymology and meaning of words.
I don't know enough to be able to say - but likely as not there are those within the US political system that deserve an equal share, yet are protected by what remains a fortune favourable to their power.
Well, I
do know, and you’re right—not necessarily that anybody deserves to
hang, but that many people in positions of power and influence deserve instead to be flattened beneath the heel of justice. Colorful metaphors aside, though, most actual punishments would more appropriately end with jail time and monetary fines—not death, and certainly not hanging.
Perhaps if we were to hang all leaders at the end of their term, we would attract the megalomaniacs that positions of power seem to attract these days. Impractical, but a thought.
I am certain you miswrote at least some of that. How much, though, I can’t say.
My guess is Saddam is alive. His death had been faked and someone was bribed. Saddam resides on some private island or something...
Unlikely.
