So...if I follow your line of reasoning, what Saddam did within his own country was no concern of ours.
No more than what Blaise Compaore does with Burkina Faso. Or any other leader of any other country. Domestic affairs are just that--domestic affairs. Saddam was fine inside his own country; stepping into Iran and Kuwait were bad ideas on his part, by any measure. Our efforts to change the practices of rogue nations are best applied from the outside, using economic levers to gain what we want. Admittedly, economic sanctions frequently only solidify the position of tyrants, but they can't hold out interminably. And it's much cheaper than war.
There was no significant threat to our nation interests to warrant an armed incursion.
That's painfully clear now, isn't it? Is anyone really, seriously arguing that Iraq posed an imminent threat to the US?
He could massacre hundreds of thousands of his own citizens but that was insufficient reason for us to become involved. We are not, after all, our brothers' keepers.
We didn't deem it necessary to be involved in Rwanda, the Congo, or today in the Sudan, and rightly so because there was no clear national interest in doing so.
Did you support the deployment of our troops in Bosnia?
No, simply because if we'd lifted the arms embargo on Bosnia, they'd have eventually solved the problem more definitively by themselves.
What possible threat to the U.S. was represented by those groups practicing ethnic cleansing? What was the threat to our national interests?
Aside from potential war between NATO members and Serbia (an improbable occurance), there was no national interest there either. We can't just base foreign policy on the notion of rescuing nations from their own damn leaders. It rarely works out in anyone's favor. Does no one else remember GWB stating clearly in televised debates, prior to his first election, that we needed to end the practice of nation-building, a response specifically addressing our prolonged engagement in Bosnia? We're still there, by the way. Where is that GWB?
We can't base our foreign policy on the misguided assumption that giving our enemies what they want will mollify them.
Of course not. Sherman, set the WayBack Machine to 1994. WJC made a deal with the North Koreans regarding their nuclear program--widely and rightly criticized at the time--which the North Koreans promptly violated with no further sanctions from the US. What was accomplished there? Nothing, at least not for the US or the security of our Pacific allies.
Yet when it comes to force, GWB seems to be following the mantra of, "When all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail." The US has a lot more than hammers in its toolbag.
