“Stalin ruled the Soviet Union with an iron fist, but his death didn’t really help the Russians get a better government, or shed the burdens of living in a police state.” Yet it eventually occurred without a full-scale US invasion :)

I think we would have had to give in on sanctions eventually. Our allies (many of whom we now know were bought off) were already starting to pressure for more and more exemptions to it, and I think we would have had a difficult time sustaining support for them. At some point, I think they would have had to come off.

We’re not going to get a western Democracy in Iraq. We’ll get a relatively corrupt but relatively democratic government. It’ll suck by western standards, but South Korea was a mess for a while too. I will agree that this was the worst administration possible to try a venture like this, and I was saying that before we went in, that “In principle I agree with this, but I don’t know if this administration is competent enough to take this country to war.” That said, I don’t really agree that Iraq is really aligning itself with Iran all that much. Iran is certainly trying to make it turn out that way, but I wouldn’t discount the fact that the Persian-Arab rivalry plays a part in Iraq wanting to go its own way. I agree that at this point it would be a terrible mistake to invade Iran, but I also don’t think Obama’s ideas on how to engage them will work.

Re: Getting sanctions lifted. How? We have veto power at the UN. They would not be lifted until we wanted them lifted. We could have easily sat out Saddam the way we sat out Castro. Sooner or later, if nothing else, people just retire/die on their own. In any case, just because you and I cannot necessarily see any alternatives other than sanctions vs. invasion doesn’t mean there weren’t any.

Re: Western ideas. But in the end, we are not getting a western-style liberal democracy in Iraq anyway—we’re getting a Shiite country largely aligned with Iran. Another reason why attacking Iran is a terrible idea. But you name a terrible idea, and this administration will do it.

And yes, I do think it was worth it, because I don’t see alternatives. Saddam was well on his way to getting the sanctions lifted, which, had he been successful in that, would have allowed him to rearm himself eventually. I also think it’ll be beneficial, in the long run, to bring better ideas into the middle east than radical Islam and baathism. There may be bigger assholes out there, but this big asshole was in the middle of a region that’s strategically paramount to most of the world.

It would have been nice to definitively kill or capture Osama, but he’s either a stain in a cave somewhere, or he’s hiding out in a very deep rat hole somewhere in Pakistan. If it’s the latter, that’s back to the Pakistan problem. The notion that we “let him get away” is rather ridiculous, because you can only support so many troops in a land locked country. It takes cooperation from Pakistan to move supplies into Afghanistan. Technology has changed a lot about warfare, but it hasn’t changed logistics, and armies still have to be fed, equipped, housed, and trained, which means you need ships, which means you need a port. The only way we would be able to sustain large scale military operations in Afghanistan is to either have full cooperation of Pakistan, or invade and occupy enough of Pakistan that we had access to a seaport.

And sure, we’re not supposed to assassinate heads of state, but that’s never stopped us from trying before, and what would anyone have done if we had dropped a nice, fat MOAB on Saddam? Would have saved everyone a whole lot of trouble, money and blood.

That being said, if we’re gonna take out one tyrannical, murderous asshole, Saddam is really the one that springs to your mind first? What ever happened to Osama bin Laden?

1. Make the invasion preemptive, and/or
2. Make the invasion a good idea.

That’s just an argument for it being justifiable under international law, not an argument for it being necessary, productive, or a benefit to this country.

It’s like … I can understand why a gun-banner would defend their opposition for CCW in Florida in 1987—they thought it would result in wild-west shootouts over fender-benders and blood running in the streets—but I can never understand how people can still oppose CCW, using 1987 arguments that in 2008 we know not to be valid.

Yes, war advocates tried to make us believe it was preemptive—some of us bought that line, and others of us didn’t—but as it turns out, we all know now that the man had zero capabilities with which to attack us even if he wanted to, and had not re-started any of his nuclear or biological programs. So it wasn’t preemptive, in reality.

Knowing that, I find it puzzling that you still say you support what we did, when it has so clearly been a complete and total waste of lives, money, goodwill, matériel, and pretty much anything else that went into it.

AQ in Iraq getting weaker
AQ in Afghanistan/Pakistand getting stronger

AQ in Iraq was never there till we went there
AQ in Afghanistan never went away because we went after a bad guy with no WMD’s and bad information from a dude we tortured…

So you are in favor of Pre-emptive war I see. Sweet.

I agree with you—Pakistan is a sticky issue. Afghanistan less so, because it’s a failed state and we can basically do whatever we want. But yeah, it’s tied to Pakistan and I don’t know what to do about that. The entire region is volatile and unpredictable and I often find myself thinking the rather illiberal “Maybe we should just fucking nuke the entire region and be done with it” haha. I don’t actually think we can solve the Pakistan problem militarily, I just get frustrated.

I’m a graphic designer, not a politician or a diplomat :)

The other two quotes fit with that: We are wasting blood and treasure in Iraq, where al Qaeda didn’t exist in the first place and is unable to gain a foothold due to it’s inhabitant’s rejection of it (which is not a result of the surge), yet there are other areas that we have been neglecting where the inhabitants are quite friendly to al Qaeda—Afghanistan and Pakistan come to mind—that we should be concentrating on.

Also, Obama was not referring solely to al Qaeda, he said “Nearly every threat we face,” which includes but is not restricted to al Qaeda—the threat of Iran, to the extent that it actually exists, has nothing whatsoever to do with al Qaeda. He’s saying that all other threats are increasing as we concentrate everything in Iraq, where it is needed the least (and, in my opinion, should never have been sent in the first place).