"But we really needed to deal with Saddam as he was funding terrorism, openly paying families of suicide terrorists, bragging about his nuclear mujadeen (and we did find a lot of yellow cake uranium), and generally an evil person. "
Dude, we destroyed and occupied the WRONG country.
By your stated measure above, we should have eliminated the Mullahs in Iran instead.
Certainly, then, if we needed to take out Iraq it would have been much easier and we would have incurred far, far fewer losses.
Iran's support to the resistance in Iraq cost at least 2,000 American lives and probably another 5,000 wounded.
Dude, we destroyed and occupied the WRONG country.If you're going to go after terrorism, then Afghanistan and Iraq needed to go.
But so does Syria and Iran.
But we are doing several things wrong:
- We should have follow Britain's example and install dictators of our own. At least until culture change and education level change can be brought about. As long as they are muslims hell bent on destroying infidels, they aren't ready for democracy.
- We respected their culture which didn't deserve respect. We should have destroyed their mosques during the war. And flooded their media with Christians. Change the culture if you want to get away from terrorism.
- We should have changed their laws to respect all human rights. Sodomizing boys should be illegal with severe repercussions. Women should have been allowed to vote. Religious rights should have been respected.
- We should have had a media campaign on human rights.
- We should have collected war reparations. We freed them, but we should have gotten reimbursed. If for no other reason, that a strong America is good for the world.