GrimCO: It doesn't take a genius to control a populace armed with rifles. All it takes is a strong military and a ruthless dispensing of it's superior power.
So Hussein's military - mostly consisting of shi'ites, by the way - was strong enough to control them but our army is not?
Ask the armed Kurds and Shiites who decided to "rise up" against an oppressive regime in Iraq.
Ask southern confederates who's revolt was bloodily defeated or indian tribes that were exterminated. Or the slaves in america pre-1865. They were all oppressed, right?
Neither oppression was possible without support of the majority of the population for the government. And if the majority of the population supports the government enough to fight for it or keep otehr groups in check, that majority could not feel that much oppressed.
The ability of citizens to possess guns in no way prevents a totalitarian dictatorship from controlling the populace with it's military.
Not true. USA won its freedom with guns. Afghanistan held off russians. If the population cares to fight - when it feels oppressed enough and has arms, it does.
Saying a bunch of people carrying rifles can intimidate, much less overwhelm a military with chemical weapons, artillery and tanks and the will to use them is ridiculous.
Who do you think served in the iraqi army? Foreign mercenaries? most of the army were actually shia - the supposedely oppressed majority.
And as I've said before - which you've ignored - how would you deal with people who rose in armed revolt against the US government during the time of war in cooperation with the enemy?
If so, tell the Palestinians about it. Perhaps they'll quit strapping bombs to their chests in desperation and defeat the Isreali army with their rifles.
First, they are doing quite well.
Second, they are not that well armed and most of them do not feel that much oppressed as to risk their lives fighting israelis. If they were well-armed, they might have chosen to throw out Arafat and the rest of the militants who provoke the violence, which is one reason that PA is in no particular hurry to arm them and the militants can execute unarmed people accused in collaboration with Israelis - often rightly so. Being unarmed, they can not fight and can only collaborate with israelis to put an end to the violence.
Palestinians have things to live for - in fact their population grows faster than israelis and they will have won without any fight in a generation or two. They realise that. It's only some political groups that want to achieve their private goals now and are not interested in prosperity, let alone democracy for all palestinians, who provoke the violence. But who said the militants were acting in the palestinian interests?
BTW, israelis with rifles did very well in 1947 against several arab armies. So did jews in Warsaw ghetto and desperate armed people in other places. Shamil kept off the russian empire from Chechya for decades 150 years ago.
Anyway, I can give you many reasons why people who are oppressed would choose not to fight.
It's you who made an assertion that armed population that was being "massacred" would choose not to fight. Why not? What did they get to lose?
Oppression is exibited in specific things - like limiting the right to bear arms, to own property, to travel abroad, to vote, to work, to run businesses. If you ignore them and state that you can have oppression despite them, you could as well accuse USA of oppression greater than Hussein's.
Sure, we have (limited) right to bear arms, free press, (limited) free market and voting BUT if some kurds or shia muslims - we certainly have them here - or russian immigrants or blacks or chinese were to rise with arms against the government - or just passively oppose it (like Branch Davidians) - they would have certainly got slaughtered. Does it mean that we are intolerably oppressed?
If oppression is not based on actual acts, what the heck is it? Just a label?
Sure, Hussein jailed and killed some people in iraq that did not mind their own business and dared to interfere in areas of politics that were out of limits.
Every country has such boundaries. Try to grow a certain plant on your back yard and you will quickly join 25% of world's prison inmates that are currently spend time in our jails. Owning gold after 1933 and before 1975 would have landed you in jail too.
How many people jailed for such offences died in prison from various causes over the course of last 20 years? Maybe more than were killed in Iraq's prisons by Hussein's political machine.
Is that oppression that we have here? Many people think so. Is it bad enough that they are ready to raise in arms? Not really.
I am not saying that Hussein was not oppressive. Just that he was not nearly oppressive enough for the population to dispose of him, despite having means of doing so. In fact, many iraqis said - including to me personally - that SH was a cruel SOB, but that such qualities were necessary to keep the country from civil war or from fall into religious totalitarism.
If Hussein did not supress some kurds, they would have been slaughtered by turks that would never permit independent Kurdistan. How many kurds did SH kill? Few thousand? Turks killed almost 2 million armenians and plenty of kurds over the last 100 years.
If SH allowed shia to take power in Iraq or even to form a separate state, instead of killing the most radical and militant religious fundamentalists of them (who do you think they were, those people in mass graves, pro-american free-market democrats?), they would have established a pro-Iranian sharia-based theocracy.
Are you so sure that majority of shia or kurds or iraqi sunni wanted that outcome? Could there have beem many kurds and shia that though "good riddance" to those dead religious zealots?
miko
