john9001: miko , your words are in english , but i do not understand their meaning.
some bad guys are dead, as Martha would say "it's a good thing".
reports from bagdad say people are celabrating in the streets on the news Uday is dead.
I completely agree that the Hussein family are the bad guys. Theologically speaking, they are eligible for a spot in Hell just for volunteering to run a country.
They killed a lot of people, sure.
On the other hand we have to think on the margin here, not in general. Anyone capable of staying in control of a unified secular socialist Iraq would have been a bad guy and would have had to kill and intimidate a lot of people, so by selecting the "best" ruler we have to concentrate on relative badness, not absolute one.
Basically, whoever could kill the least number of people in iraq and still prevent a breakdown and civil war (resulting in much more deaths) would be the optimal choice.
Obviously, since it is very hard to estimate an exact number, it always pays for a ruler to be on the safe side and kill few thousands more political opponents than strictly necessary. This way one can be more sure of averting a civil war that would have cost hundreds of thousands dead, mostly innocent civilians remote from politics.
I am not so sure that having bad guys dead is always a good thing. I have been watching the post-colonial africa closely as well as other "liberated" areas.
Since the decolonisation and eviction of bad imperialist exploiters, they were killing bad guys non-stop, but the new leaders consistently proved even worse than their predecessors and harder on the population.
Ian Smith was considered a bad guy untill we knew Mugabe, Tito was considered overly harsh in running Yugoslavia untill we had the ethnic cleansing. Heck, even Tsar Nikolas the Second was considered a tyrant by many before Stalin came on the scene.
I see a lot of statements that Hussein killed too many people.
Our plans for Iraq are exactly the same as his - keeping it unified, secular and socialist.
I believe we will have to find out for ourselves how many people need to be killed in order to keep Iraq orderly and unified and out of hands of muslim fundamentalists.
I am far from sure that hoever succeeds in subduing Iraq, his totals would be much lower than Hussein's.
miko