Originally posted by Shuckins
By the way...say what you want about the criminality of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. It would have been a far greater crime against humanity to have left Saddam in power. Pooh pooh the mass graves in Iraq if you are so inclined. You seem more disposed toward bashing the U.S. than toward expressing any outrage over the revelation of so great a crime.
The thing is, we invaded Iraq on a bogus pretext using a faulty interpretation of the principal of pre-emptive self defence, not out of humanitarian concern for the general iraqi population. If you rob a bank and while running away drop a bag of cash that is later picked up by a homeless person, it does not make you a philanthropist. To bemoan the fate of the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi dead of the 1990's after having urged-on both sides in the 1980s Iran-Iraq conflict that produced
millions of dead looks like dumb hypocrisy from where I'm standing. To the hawks, the Iraqi victims are only important when it is politically expedient.
Unlike some nations, we believe in correcting our errors in judgement. I prefer an honest mistake to the vile moral turpitude of those governments who opposed the invasion because of close economic ties to a murderous, dictatorial thug.
That's very emotive, but it is basically nonsense.
Here's Islam Karimov, "president" of Uzbekistan, who is well known for systematic human rights abuses including torture and extra-judicial killings. Now, it just so happens that Uzbekistan, like Iraq, sits on huge potential mineral wealth; do you think this has anything to do with his cosy relationship with the current US administration? Do you think that if Karimov steps out of line like Hussein eventually did that we might start seeing people like Gunslinger posting URLs like
http://www.stopdictatorkarimov.com/ as the government PR machine kicks in and our leaders prepare us for yet another
regime change?
What about those other paragons of human rights and democracy, the Saudi and Egyptian regimes? How do you square your statement above with the fact that they are key US allies and also practise widespread torture and other human rights abuses?
If you're going to take a moral standpoint on these issues, then you need to be consistent. Villifying the government's latest bogeyman while simultaeneously leaving the other bad apples out of the equation just makes you look ignorant. Alternatively, you can put aside the government-sanctioned hysteria, hyperbole and false rationalisations and look at the bigger picture in terms of
realpolitik and the very pressing geo-political and strategic reasons for the US enforced Iraqi regime change.
