And I guess the death squads roaming the streets of Baghdad looking for those that “aren’t the right kind of people” are a major improvement over a power hungry dictator. Saddam loved Iraqi citizens that were loyal to him and killed those who he feared or opposed him. Typical dictator behavior, and easy to live with once you understand the terms and conditions. Now Iraqis are being blown up as they pray, or when are at the market trying to buy food. That’s an improvement.

/irony
At least the democratically elected government isn’t involved in torture like the Saddam regime. There are no torture chambers in the basement of Interior Ministry buildings. Gone are the mass graves of a dozen bodies found tortured and brutally murdered. Driving around Baghdad is safe. Kidnappings are at an all time low.
/ironyoff

By the way, it’s estimated 300,000+ people have been killed in Darfur, and hundreds continue to die each week. Please don’t pull the “we’re saving the Iraqis from the Brual dictator” line… we armed Saddam when it suited us (late 80′s Rumsfeld handshake video), and he was equally evil then.

As for Saddam breaking treaties, express your indignation to an American Indian. I’m sure you’ll get plenty of sympathy.

Jim

Read some of my other posts and I address most of your issues.

I can’t believe you buy this hook line and sinker. A rational person would see it just doesn’t add up, but you seem desperate to validate the huge mistake of invading Iraq. We’re up to, what, three generals so far that have called for Rumsfeld to resign? By the way it’s good to know you consider Hitchens a reliable source.

One must wonder that given all the other evidence that Saddam had no nuclear program why he would go after yellow cake. Maybe he just wanted to make us think he had a program. But be honest with us Gias, you know the whole nuclear capable Iraq was a just a scare tactic to build enough support to invade a country half way across the world from the US. North Korea was more of a threat at the time, and given how many US citizens are stationed in South Korea, it was much more serious threat. But we don’t care about that; 30,000+ citizens in South Korea is no worry.

Now look at the mess the US invasion of Iraq has created, and what is happening in Iran. At the time 9/11 occurred, Iran was headed by a moderate, reformist President who harshly denounced 9/11 and offered the US the use of air bases in Iran to track down alqaeda in Afghanistan. But then Bush goes and calls Iran an axis of evil and invades a neighboring country. Wonder how the Iranian people felt about that? In 2005 the people of Iraq voted in the only Presidential candidate that openly stated his distrust and disrespect for America. Naturally he was elected, and now we have a fundamentalist Iranian President bound and determined to stand up to what he percieves as American/Western imperalism. Nice work!

My question to you Gias- Which would you rather have – Saddam with some yellow cake and no way to enrich it, or the situation that is developing in Iraq and Iran?

Jim

Word to the really nasty folks out there – would you say the things you write on comment sections in front of a child? Children can read ANY blog, folks. Please, you can disagree, but keep it civil. Otherwise, you have no class and your comments mean less than zero.

Scott Johnson at Powerline digs into the media archives for a revealing comparison of current hyperventilation over President BushÂ’s 2003 declassification of portions of the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE)….

My friend over at The Gun Toting Liberal is up in arms about the latest news in the Valerie Plame Affair. Now I like the GTL a lot, we disagree quite a bit but in this instance he begins the post with a mischaracterization of facts and goes down hill …

It’s also apparent that there are a lot of people who think longer is better (hint, people probably aren’t interested in a comment that is five or six times longer than the original post) and that this comment section is a place to go bounding off wildly on tangents.

Accordingly, and to avoid charges that I suppressed dissent selectively, I am wiping everything out of the holding area (including the people who simply can’t seem to make a comment without including obscenities). That includes people who wanted to argue about this post and people who wanted to agree with it.

We’ll try this again. Keep it short, keep it clean and keep it on topic. I’ll let comments on that meet those criteria and will nuke any, pro or con, that don’t. Simple enough?

If you