First of all, the answer is a resounding “no!” But what question am I answering? I read more reports on Saddam Hussein’s second trial. His warplanes gassed a whole bunch of people. Definitely not right, definitely not cool, definitely WRONG WRONG WRONG. But why? He had trouble maintaining order. He was a cruel dictator that could only maintain order by terror.
Perhaps the US should have taken a clue from his actions before we invaded Iraq. I agree, getting rid of Saddam was the right thing to do. Dismantling his weapons programs, his genocide programs, and his reign of terror–all good things to do, and I’m glad he did them. But we should have known how hard it would be to wrest that country from the religious division it’s had (Shiite vs. Sunni vs. Kurd, etc.). We should have known that trying to bring democracy to people who don’t really want it would be a tough sell.
My thoughts: after outsing Saddam, we should have left the various factions alone to fight it out. Would that be very humanitarian? No. But then again, there are things going on in other places in the world that are not humanitarian either (such as Africa).
We should have toppled Saddam, and let the country do what it wanted to do–fight each other. Let the United Nations try to fix it–they are impotent most other places, why not give them a grand center stage in which to fail, which I sure they would have.
Yes, we should have removed Saddam and ended the ties to terrorism. But, we should have bugged out aftewards and let the country do what it wants to do, which is apparently kill each other. At least, they’d be killing each other and not our soldiers. And they’d have been so busy killing each other that they’d have no time or resources to support terrorism. It’s a lost opportunity…we could have “won” in Iraq, if only we’d taken the clue that Saddam gave us…..