Your Solutions on....

Is it definitely less? I've never seen any accurate statistics of how many people Saddam killed. Even if it's more than we've killed I find it a weak justification when you consider we were propping him up at the time (and very likely sold him the biological agents he used on the Kurds and Iranians). I'm sure at the time the Reagan administration would have greatly downplayed Hussein's record, and now it suits Bush's purpose to paint him as a mass murderer so he's this horrendous evil that had to be stopped. Since we're engaging in moral relativism regarding the deaths we're responsible for, maybe Saddam was just doing what he thought he needed to do to keep his corner of the world from civil war. Maybe he justified it the same way we do. I don't see our government as all that different, honestly. Our rhetoric is just in service of different gods, so to speak. As long as we're torturing people in secret prisons, clamping down on freedom of speech and transparency, electing leaders by goverment mandate instead of popular will, and causing thousands of innocent deaths, does it really matter what idealistic slogans are stitched on our flag? We don't even live by them ourselves anymore.

I think it's incredibly sad that the best defense of the USA is now --"We aren't quite as bad as Saddam".

My calculation came out to over 100,000 deaths per year. This includes the deaths from the various wars he was primarily responsible for (the most deadly being the Iran-Iraq war) and the hundreds of thousands who died as a result of sanctions and the steadily declining quality of life for the average Iraqi. Have you compared the life expenctancy and infant mortality (just to take two simple numbers) from the time when Saddam took office up to 2003?


Maybe, but according to your logic weren't they correct? If Saddam was stabilizing the country and saving so many lives wasn't it a noble endeavor to support him at the time?


Assuming there had been no invasion in 2003 how do you envision the alternate future of Iraq? Was it just about to turn around and things were going to start getting much better for the average Iraqi? Were tensions between Shiites and Sunnis slowly melting away? Was Saddam about to start a slow process of more democratic and fair government?

Assuming there was no invasion how was Iraq not going to end up in a far worse civil war than there is now, because there would have been absolutely no stability. Maybe the Baathist regime would have held on for another 20 years (all the while oppressing the majority of the population), and when the revolution/civil war finally came who in the world would care as many millions killed each other. After all there would be little or no oil left at that point, so we just stand by as we do Africa, and whichever faction prevailed would have no money to rebuild.

"It is so confusing reading posts by you because you refuse to use the quote feature.

Make it easy on us, please."

If simple punctuation confuses you, it's no great loss to me that you can't understand what I'm saying.

Musuko.

You'll note that he did not attribute those deaths directly to American troops, which is exactly what you did.

-Kiamat Dusk

Well what do you think kills more people, Kiamat, an IED or a 500lb bunker buster? Still clinging to your denial I see.

Simple punctuation? Well if you are too much of a dumb-ass to click the QUOTE button thats your problem. Your posts are definetly worth the ignore feature.

Briana Dawson

Well, no one's going to agree with me most likely, but I say we have it backwards right now.

The military should mostly be within our borders (as in, the department of defense), and the various spy/surveillance/black ops type agencies should be "out there", disrupting them from within before they can get here(including frequent assassinations).

Now generally, decentralized, redundant systems are more secure in the long run, because they can "ablate" damage away, route around it, and continue to function. Thus most of our critical infrastructure should be either privatized (and really privatized, dutch auction style, not just sold off en-masse to a crony) and/or taken over by local governments. This way there's no one "head" for them to target.

Third, and this is the most controversial maybe, allow every citizen to carry a concealed weapon. 9-11 wouldn't have happened if the passengers, or even the flight attendants, had been armed. The true "first responder" is the person on the scene to begin with.

not really controversial, at least not down here. shoot (pun intended) everybody carries guns down here, either personally or in their vehicles, yes i do have a gun rack in my truck. now everyone can carry them, it is in the Bill of Rights after all, you just need the required permits and safety training etc,etc,etc. noone took that right away, just ppl don't 9 times out of 10.

Chip, I'm still curious to hear what you think Iraq would be like today if we hadn't invaded and how you think its future would have most likely panned out.

The question is, of course, open to everyone.