Quote Originally Posted by mraynrand
Really? What about the 5k children/year starved to death under the U.N. "Oil for food" scandal? What about Iraqis firing on U.S. planes? What about Iraq housing Zarqawi as a guest after he fled Afghanistan? What about Saddam paying off terrorist families as a gift, after their kids slaughter Jews with suicide belts? What about Saddam welcoming the bomb chemist from the 1993 WTC bombing as a personal guest ('ONLY' 6 killed, 1000 wounded from that terrorist plot). Yes, it was 'all about WMDs' - at least that's all the press told you to believe. What about the Oil? I thought the war was about Oil? Is there more Oil in Iraq or in Afghanistan? Whcih country is more important for Oil production? Haven't we secured the oil in one of the richest oil fields in the world?

Did it ever occur to you that some of the terrorists that gave up in Iraq have returned to Afghanistan, just like Zarqawi fled to Iraq after we routed al Quaeda in Afghanistan in 2001? It's a bit like whack a mole, but with each whack, there are less and less murderous, sick twisted islamic fascists. After Iraq, we'll go kick the shit out of them with greater ferocity in Afghanistan, hopefully until they can't even crawl away.

But from your post I see you prefer slaughtering civilians by remote control in Kosovo. got it.
The "reasons" you list (oil for food scandal, shooting down planes, gifts to terrorist, playing host to terrorists) might make Saddam a bad guy, but they don't exactly distinguish him from many other leaders in the Middle East and around the world. Some of those leaders have been supported or even propped up by the US when their presence is deemed to be favorable to US economic interests. So these "reasons" alone are clearly not sufficient cause for the US to invade, and they would be conveniently overlooked in other contexts. So don't play the moral card and pretend the Iraq invasion was about helping Iraqis or building democracy or any of that crap. "Democracy" abroad only matters to the necons when it serves as a palliative for US interests. If you're an imperialist at heart--and by imperialist I mean someone whose foreign policy decisions are motivated by self-interest--then come out and say so. If not, if morality plays a role in foreign policy, then the "humanitiarian-democratic" excuses, as well as the "whack-a-mole" theory, don't hold water. How do you justify taking a country to the brink of self-destruction, with all the suffering that implies, just because that enabled you to create a concentrated kill zone for insurgents? Not to mention that the war in fact made becoming an insurgent all that much more attractive for a certain sector of the Islamic world...