Lucky for us, we don't live in a zero-sum world.
The Iraq War was a horrifically unjustified campaigned based on bad intelligence and acted as a poor guise for an imperialistic land grab. Ultimately, it destabilized the entire region and caused the deaths of thousands, both of our own military and innocent Iraqi civilians.
......and......
Saddam Hussein was undoubtedly a brutal authoritarian who had little to no respect for human rights and the rule of law. That he shouldn't have been deposed by Americans in the Iraq War isn't to say he shouldn't have been deposed by his own people in favor of a government that had more respect for the basic rights of its people.
See, is that really so hard? Two statements, both true, and neither of them contradicting one another.
Besides, if you really want to talk about leaders who kill terrorists, you really don't have to go anywhere nearly as far as Saddam Hussein and Iraq and authoritarian dictators.
But I suppose that wouldn't really fit some people's agenda, would it?
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I personally think that given even the current state of public libraries and education it's not unreasonable for every student from every cultural and economic background to graduate with AP calculus and English. If you're unemployed, there are more than enough ways to bone up on your statistics and even master differential equations during all that free time. Or master Hindi or Chinese.
That, of course, is wildly fantastic in an Hoffmannesque sort of way. Best to keep one's views on what should be done within the realm of reality. The threat is that you'll miss opportunities; the risk is that you'll reap unintended consequences. The moral threat is that you'll support a dictator or be forced to just say, "Meh, chaos, thousands dead, I can blame somebody else." Owning a moral stance requires owning up to the real-world implications and consequences of that moral stance. Otherwise it's all fantasy and pie-in-the-sky, as we bask in our moral greatness and lack of introspection.
By 2003 we had seen Jugoslavija. We knew that having people rise up and overthrow a dictatorship can end very badly. We focused on Poland and the Czechs, instead. I disliked Tito and his successors. I liked that Slovenia peeled off, and even the Macedonians. But when the Serbo-Croatian core crumbled, I shuddered. It would end badly. And we'd been taught that intervening in Jugoslavija, twice, was a good thing. Or mostly good. And that not intervening in Rwanda was a bad thing, a racist thing. To intervene to save people or not? Ah, now that moral stance requires blood and gold and can produce a lot of death. The same choice was offered in Georgia, Libya, Tunisia, Egypt, Syria, and Ukraine. A lot of people are inconsistent in their choices, but that stands to reason.
But the "if the people overthrow repression they will build a democracy" as a statement of belief is just plain misguided. It's usually not accurate. It's aspirational, but unrealistic. It usually ends in disaster. Not always. Nobody likes to think about when it ends well and ends badly. That often crosses a very improper political line. It left open, however, imposing democracy. It worked in Japan and Germany in 1946, right? It's like focusing on just Poland and the Czechs for the "they'll build democracy on their own" folks. Blindness writ large.
In 2003 a bunch of people who were convinced that "if we overthrow repression we can help them build a democracy" were in charge, neocon-tainted: Just as progressives in the '30s-'50s wanted to spread communism through armed insurrection and military help, they wanted to spread democracy. (Sigh.) That missed the whole point of xenophobia and cultural humiliation. "The Chrysanthemum and the Sword" at the very least should have been required reading; it was more up-to-date than the briefings they got, and it's from 1946. So they inevitably screwed up--not always in the ways we like to say they did. (For example, dissolving the army ended a failed process, but it wasn't the first course of action. They had no Plan B, but rather than saying their Plan A failed we chortle that they had no Plan A. We paint the devil as black as possible, when he usually appears as an angel of light. Ahem.)
We learned the "you can't impose democracy" lesson too well, because sometimes you can. You can't easily impose democracy. You can, but it's not easy and depends on the culture and history. Japan? Sure. Iraq? Nuh-uh. That avoids the "should we impose democracy question?" of course. But the "if they overthrow repression they'll wind up with democracy" folk didn't learn their lesson. They saw Tunisia. Springtime for Arabs. A new hope for the Middle East.
Then they saw Libya, where we had to defend protesters against a civil war and the Writer of the Little Green Book had threatened to destroy Benghazi. Shades of Bosnia, Rwanda. We must do something. So we helped them overthrow a dictator and you know what? They didn't build a democracy. We watched Egypt overthrow a dictator. They didn't build democracy. The response was often, "Well, they should have. I supported the effort, they screwed up, but my thinking is right. Reality just didn't work out." At some point you start saying that reality beats fantasy. The possible isn't probable, and if you bet against the house often enough you're broke. Financially or morally.
So with Syria. I've wanted Assad gone for a long time. At the same time, for 20 years now, I've been fully aware that to dispose of a dictator often leads to worse things. The real choices were two: Opine that Assad is bad but should be allowed to put down the protests or handle them as he sees fit; opine that Assad is bad and we should support the protesters. Once the protesters were supported and the idea of a bloodless coup wasn't going to happen, they morphed into insurgencies. Again, there was a two-fold choice: Back them morally and leave it at that or assist them materially. If materially, we could provide low-level help and logistics or intervene in a big way. Does it matter which I choose? In reality, I change little. But I can learn, and to choose wrong has the same sort of conscience-dinging effect that shouting while watching a movie, "Yeah, rape that bitch" would. It affects nothing. At the same time, as part of a larger collective my attitude helps shape policy and national consciousness. If most people had been dead set against the Iraq invasion in 2003, it wouldn't have happened. Bush II thought he had enough support to pull off an invasion. Gee, he did. If everybody had been against him, the army would have said, "Um, no, sir."
In Syria, American policy went with the dreamers and supported the protesters. Then the US went with the anti-war group and opted for low-level support. Just enough to destabilize, not enough to produce a victory. The dreamers like to say that they had good goals, albeit unrealistic ones. The anti-war group like to blame "neocons" like Obama or HRC, completely missing not just the origin of the phrase "neocon" (former progressives who newly turned conservative) but even the idea that neocons had to be, well, conservative and not even just mainstream. Like the President said, "We built this." Support was high for giving moral and ethical support to the protesters. Support was against being generous with munitions and troops for the protesters.
Had Assad done what he'd have wanted to do and rolled over the protesters, killing hundreds, we'd have a stable dictatorship and fewer dead, fewer refugees, and a fairly prosperous and educated country. Between supporting Assad and fighting him is the not-so-high ground of saying, "Can't do anything. I'll look elsewhere." But having intervened, the high ground had to go to greater support, "in for a penny, in for a pound"--which probably would have ended badly, to be honest. Doing it the way the US and the West did it, though, has ended badly.
The "if they overthrow repression they'll build a democracy" crowd are like abstinence-only folk. "No birth control, and things will work out like I want--and if they don't, ah, well, not my problem." They're like the equal-opportunity folk in the '60s: Remove barriers, and racial equality will follow. They make Simeon Stylites appear to have his feet firmly planted on old terra firma.
There's little faith-based foreign policy that doesn't lead to bad consequences. Assad was bad; he was preferable, but shouldn't have been supported. This isn't particularly high moral ground, but it's better than actively supporting or assisting change. It allows for limited leverage that might be used to do what the British did to the Ottomans--pressure them into treating its citizens better. Many of the "enlightened" Ottoman practices boasted of were imposed from without. As for Assad, few supported him and few were aiding his overthrow until the Arab Spring. Letting bad things happen is often different from helping bad things to happen.
Saddam Hussein is a bit different. He shouldn't have been deposed. But he was corrupt, he was a tyrant, he oppressed people. He shouldn't have been supported. In the years before 2003, though, anti-US fervor led to many supporting Hussein. Remove sanctions, let him access funds, etc., etc. He'd reformed, the stuff may be dual use but was necessary and we could trust him. (At the same time, many of the chemical supplies that Saddam used to gas Kurds and Iranians had also been "dual use."
Ending sanctions was necessary to help the people--ignoring the fact that Saddam chose not to abide by stipulations that would have allowed a lot of imports that would have helped people, but didn't because of pride. (Ooh, Ruth Benedict, where are you?) This reached the point that in early 2003 Americans went to act as human shields. This wasn't "don't attack"; this was "support." The left-of-center position in 2002 was pretty much against sanctions and supporting a reformed, changed Saddam. It was as much anti-US as it was pro-Saddam, with little daylight between the two positions. This was not a moral high ground at the time. In fact, much of the high morality claimed would have been revealed as swampland if things had worked out either way--if Saddam had stayed, and continued his torturing, or if democracy had broken out. But the risk was betting on failure of democracy or risking having democracy succeed, and the realistic side was "failure." To be honest, many of his supporters were completely lala-land fantasists, simply historically unaware--they heard part of the story, had a political stance, and filled in the rest in a way that kept themselves happy. They lucked into reality.
Why do I say that? Because the big realist argument against invasion was "insurgency forthcoming." Like with Afghanistan. It was a valid one. However, during the insurgency the accompanying claim was that if the West just got out of their way, the Iraqis would work out their peace and form a good society. Well, that didn't happen. We recall the self-adulatory first claim and slide past the second.
Oddly, in 2007 and 2008 the establishment (D) position was also more pro-Assad (or anti-Bush II) than we like to remember. Assad as "axis of evil" was billed as a reformer and not all that bad. It was only after we saw people-like-us protesting that many (D) turned on him. Sadly, many of those against intervention were also against sanctions, which defaults to support.
