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Originally Posted by FlamesAddiction
20 years is not even a blink of an eye when it comes to these issues... especially when you consider that some of the same people who make the decisions now were making the decisions then.
It's really convenient to not have to go back 20 years. I suppose we should not hold anything against Saddam Hussein for anything that happened 20 years ago.
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Depends how you look back. There is a big difference.
Like this.....
George Bush's decision to abide by the UN resolution and keep the very tenuous coalition together and allow Saddam to stay in power, coupled with them allowing Saddam to fly his airforce (helicopters) unrestricted has lead to the problems we have had over the last 4 years in Iraq. Had Saddam been removed from power, there had been no sactions or bloackade and no food for Oil who knows how the middle east would look like today?
where there is actual trying to connect the dots in a logical manner.
Or something like this (which I continually see)...
The US armed and supplied Saddam Hussein throughout his reign of terror giving all his chemical weapons. With the end of the first Gulf War along with sactions Hussein had been removed as a threat to the US. The US imposing sanction and the Food for Oil deal further crippled Iraq. There was no evidence that he had WMD.
The second sound fairly reasonable until you run it up against some facts.
The first sentence clear ignores that China, Russian, France, Brittain, Germany, Canada and several other European countries were doing the same as the US. Also in regards to the Chemical weapons.... they weren't giving him the weapons. They were supplying him with the materials to MAKE the weapons. Things that the Oil industry uses everyday can easily be turned into chemical weapons. Those countries, not only the US, just ignored the "extra" amounts ordered for the Oil industry.
The second sentence forgetting that UN was trying to remove Saddam's threat to his neighbours. 9/11 made the US see Saddam as a direct threat to themselves.
The third sentence iqnores that these sanctions were imposed on Iraq not by the US but by the UN because Saddam refused to allow unhindered inspections by the UN. Had he allowed unhindered inspection the sanctions would have disappeared. The Food for Oil was simply so Iraqi people could eat while Saddam built several palaces with monies from smuggling oil to China, Germany, France and Russia. The UN bagged a lot of money of of that!
The last sentence forgets the first and ignores the facts above. Saddam played chicken with a freight train and the inevitable happened.