[spinestein]

[...they can only manage a half sentence of condemnation of Hussein: "Of COURSE he was evil, BUT...Bush is..." blah blah blah.]



That's bothered me the most about their arguments as well, their virtually excusing Saddam Hussein's genocide of a million people with lame comments like "Well, at least he kept those people in line." Inherent in such comments is the belief that "those people" are not capable of self governance, as if they were only 300 years down from the trees and lack the mental capacity for such ideas; the only way they can survive at all is to live in perpetual slavery under a brutal theocracy.

They might as well say "I've got MY freedom, screw those donkey-riders on the other side of the globe."

[stm]

By "keeping them in line" what he actually did to a lot of them was break their spirit. You can beat an unruly dog long and hard enough that eventually it will lose it's unruliness, but in the process you will have destroyed it. That's exactly what Saddam did to generations of good Iraqi people. What he did to those poor people was absolutely unconscionable.

During the war and even afterward, we had men come up to us, lift their shirts and point to terrible scars they received from all the beatings and they would usually only utter only one word...."Saddam". We would put our left hand on their shoulder reassuringly, nod our heads and draw our right index fingers across our throats and they understood. We were going to catch that bastard and his sons and we were going to kill them. And we succeeded. We just let the Iraqi's take care of Saddam directly, as it should have been.

Personally I would have liked to have seen the trap door swing open simultaneously for Saddam, Uday and Qusay. For the Iraqi people that would have been true justice.