Am I the only one here on DU who wishes Saddam still ruled Iraq?

If he did, 600,000 more Iraqis would be alive and 3000 American Soldiers would be celebrating the New Year but are instead gone forever.

but at least they had electricity and clean water in the meantime.

Also--- do they not fear for their lives today? Me-thinks they fear far more now than under Saddam.

Will it be the US Military?

The Insurgents?

Al Quaeda?

The Iraqi Police?

Local Sharia-enforcing vigilantes?

Every day is a new adventure in Iraq!

under Saddam.

i think under saddam, only a few select people lived in fear, for the majority it was stable.

and hell yes i wish saddam was still in charge. we had a unfinished job in afganistan.

meet the new boss, same as the old boss

the only thing worse than a corrupt tyrant, is an incompetent corrupt tyrant

The average Iraqi has not benefitted by our meddling.

But a lot of Iraqis these days talk about how things were better under him than us. Hell, it's been 4 years and most of them still don't have electricity or water! Tell me that's not deliberate!

As Ian said upthread, they lived in fear but had the basic necessities and an overall higher standard of living than many ME countries. I suppose if you were a Sunni Ba'athist, you had nothing to fear. For everyone else, each day was a crap shoot.

I was about to say, optimistically, that someday the fighting will end, but then I remembered they've been feuding for a thousand years. :evilfrown:

And now if you're Shia...you have nothing to fear.... At least after they take full control of the country.

...and that won't end anytime soon. The Kurds are probably the best off, but even they have Turkey to deal with.

It's an utter shithole now. A much worse shithole then before...

A little fact the US media has never mentioned is The Fratricide War; and the wee fact that more Kurds have been killed by KURDS than by Iran, Turkey & Hussein. Combined.

And both Kurd warlord leaders; Talabani and Barzani, at one time & the other, including AFTER the 1991 uprisings, were ALLIES of Saddam Hussein.

But shhhh! The US "msm" and their rightwing masters don't want Americans to know such facts!

What's up w all the dupes lately!

One is glad he's dead...this one isn't.

My post posted twice; I erased the 2nd post as a dupe.

duh...

I should have realized that's what you'd thought, so duh on me, too, LOL!

:hug:

administration opened Pandora's Box and threw away the lid. Nothing will surprise me anymore.

and not defending Saddam. He wasn't a nice guy. However, it was up to the Iraqi people to stop him, not us.
For those who responded that the Iraqi people lived in fear - they still do. He may well be replaced by someone far worse.

a difference between bad, and worse- and i believe we are all worse off today, than we were in the year 2000- in so many, many ways.

The entire world has been harmed by the selection of g.w.bush and his atrocities.

has said that President Bush should have said, "Hey, sorry about your sons. But you're in charge again. Don't mess up, or we'll invade again."

It really is as simple as that.

Saddam was the type of person the country needed to hold it together. Our government and the media hyped what a mercilous killer he was and now that we see what he has been replaced with, how has the country gained. A bad guy, sure, but in a region of the world full of horrible dictators.

We had a very recent precedent.

That Ms. Rice (whose specialty is supposed to be Eastern European studies) didn't have enough personal intelligence to see the similarities in Iraq and could not have foreseen that it would devolve into another Kosovo is inexcusable.

I guess the same way she couldn't have foreseen anyone would fly planes into buildings or that the levies would break -- the woman has no imagination at all.

So George Bush's legacy will be that he removed the only secular government in the Middle East and replaced it with an Islamic republic -- run by a figurehead prime minister who rules only with the support of warring militia leaders.

John Kerry would be president...

RL

Why?

And will post saying how arogant you are for wanting the poor Iraqis to suffer under that "madman" Hussein.

Totally ignoring the fact (as always) that even HRW and AI et al said the invasion of Iraq was NOT justified on humanitarian grounds as Hussein's atrocities had been 20-some years in the past and that in fact the Iraqis are WORSE OFF NOW than they were under Hussein during his heyday of atrocities...20+ years ago.

How so? You may disagree with the poster, but I don't see how what the OP said was "arrogant". It was his/her opinion, and frankly, a pretty brave thing to post.

I will confess that there have been times when I have thought that it would be much better to have Saddam still in power with the world watching him than to have the incredible mess today. I have a hard time justifying the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, 3000 US soldiers, tens of thousands of US casualties, and years ahead of collateral damage due to the violence and living conditions in Iraq. Would Saddam have killed people during this time? Certainly. But certainly not to the scale we have during the same time.

From a philosophical perspective, it is a hard question to ask and answer.

Arrogance thinking it? Hardly.

and to be honest...it really wasn't that brave... It's just common sense in mho.

I'd wish for Hussein back as Iraq's leader.

Hell fucking yes!

Mentally and physically.

I don't doubt any of the charges against him or deny any crimes anyone claims he committed, but in terms of common sense, he had experience running the country, he knew how to keep opposing factions in line, and kept a tight, orderly ship.

In a perfect world, the death of Saddam would be a glorious thing, but this is not a perfect world. And Iraq is not a perfect country with longstanding traditions of democracy and equal rights and peaceful transfers of power.

You can't seperate the death of Saddam from the means it took to get to that point. The cost was too great and the results have been as disasterous, probably moreso, than anyone could have imagined.

If there was an arab Abraham Lincoln ready to step up and bring Sunni and Shia and Kurd together, I'd say great, lets put him in power and hope for the best, but there is no such man, nor can there be in Iraq, the divisions are too great.

This is a mess, and it's a mess that we created and decided to stick with and create even more messes and bigger messes.

The next leader of Iraq will be a new Saddam, and so will the one who follows him, and so on and so on....

We dont' understand their country, their culture or their values. We think we do, but we don't. We want them to act like us and get frustrated when they don't. Some day we'll learn not to touch the hot stove and think it'll feel cool.

i would chose neither. many iraqis needlessly died under his regime just to fortify his power over them. Its no different from what the current militia leaders are trying to do there now. so instead of one saddam we have a multitude of them running around. I would not wish that on my worst enemy.

he did not disrupt the normal fabric of life otherwise.

The Iraqis had electricity, running water, schools, hospitals, and the ability to buy groceries without fear of getting blown up. Since Saddam was a secularist, women had more rights than they did in most Middle Eastern countries.

Now, let's see, today the Iraqis may have no electricity, no running water, parents are afraid to send their children to school, hospitals are full of people with ghastly gunshot, explosion, and burn injuries, people going out grocery shopping seriously wonder whether they'll come back alive, and women are having to veil up.

Now if you were an apolitical Iraqi, which conditions would you prefer?

There's a BBC film clip in which an Iraqi interpreter tells his group of American soldiers that life was better under Saddam, and they, none of whom look old enough to drive, much less handle automatic weapons, say, "But you didn't have freedom."

And he's obviously thinking, "Yeah, but I didn't have to worry about bombs going off all over the place."

but Saddam was contained and not a threat to nobody.

We have harmed our "security" by unleashing the violence and chaos in Iraq.

Saddam was contained.