Should Saddam Hussein have stayed in power in Iraq?

[0rganism]

Poll question: Should Saddam Hussein have stayed in power in Iraq?

Someone raised a question in The Media subforum to this effect. I'd like to see what DUers in GD think of this.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=109x8260

The original question is, "Do you believe Saddam Hussein should have been left in power?"

I'll try to provide responses with a bit of nuance, but invite additional content in response.

[Mattforclark]

1. What does "should" mean?

And are we supposed to consider his "staying in power" in isolation, or to consider the consequences of that?

[0rganism]

4. That's up to you and your own sense of ethics

I agree, the question requires some kind of context, so use whatever mix of isolation and consequences you think forms an appropriate background for a position on the issue.

[Mattforclark]

13. What I meant was

am I powerful enough to wave a magic wand and make him disappear, or would it have to be done in a realistic way? That makes all the difference, and the answers would be entirely different for me...

[Mattforclark]

18. OK, I voted for

"Yes, Saddam was a necessary component of regional stability"

except it isn't so much that he was a component of regional stability, but that the alternative was likely to be bad, just as bad, or worse.

[0rganism]

21. I can't speak to the powers of your magic wand, but I inferred "realistic"

when I answered the question in the other thread. Seriously, you're welcome to elaborate as much as needed, on either the "wand waving" or "blood letting" versions of the answer.

[Preening Fop]

2. He Should Have Been Allowed To.........!

Finish the romance novel he was writing.

[Mattforclark]

3. I thought he didn't actually write it?

Maybe that will be one of the interesting things we learn about at his trial.

[RafterMan]

8. I hope they also find out

if that gay porn vid the Kuwaitis were trumpeting was really him.

I say yes.

[0rganism]

7. I suspect he'll have plenty of time to work on it now

Can you imagine what a huge distraction running a crazy middle-eastern dictatorship would be to a budding novelist?

[MrSlayer]

5. Only someone like Saddam could control that country.

He may have ruled with an Iron Fist but that's what these people needed to keep them in check. When they were ready to take control of their country they would have, whether it was a week, a year or a decade. You can not force a revolution, people have to want it. While Hussien was not a nice guy he at least had a secular society and pretty much kept to himself. Whoever takes over the country will be far worse and with an Islamic Fundamentalist mindset will actually be dangerous to us, unlike Saddam who was not. This whole thing was a serious mistake on many levels.

[rucky]

10. maybe Iraq is meant to be three separate countries

Kurdish, Sunni Triangle & Shia South. Seems natural to me.

[0rganism]

15. Do you think Turkey would tolerate an independent Kurdistan on its border?

There are three natural ethnic divisions in Iraq; but we don't know how stable they'd be as separate states. I'm pretty sure this experiment will take place eventually as a consequence of the inevitable civil war.

[RafterMan]

6. I would have said no,

but now that I learn our soldiers are torturing and murdering Iraqi prisoners, I figure why bother removing him? We had that before the war.

When I cool down, I might be back to "no".

[rucky]

9. Would've been gone soon enough

tho these aging dictators seem to live for a really long time (out of captivity).

[sandnsea]

11. Peacekeepers & pressured him out

That's what we should have done. Peacekeepers in the north and south for humanitarian reasons. Dumped some portion of that $200 billion, or however the hell much we've spent, into the north and south. With a bottom-up government and economic strategy. Let the middle get a taste and then applied political pressure to get Saddam into exile. Then we've got stability in most of the country and a country that primarily did it themselves. And some local leaders in place with the respect to take control overall.

[Maestro]

12. I voted No

but he shouldn't have been taken out of power the way he was. We needed the support of the international community.

[BigBigBear]

14. Saddam should have been overthrown by the Iraqis

with logistical and diplomatic support by moderate Arab states, and NATO if possible.

Bush Sr and Clinton both had opportunities to make this happen, and both failed.

"Should have been left in power?" - I don't understand the question. Should we have invaded but kept Saddam as a figurehead? No SHould we have invaded and removed him ouselves? No.

Should we have made a moral case against the man in the court of world opinion, with moderate Arab states, with the skeptical Arab masses, with a sanctiond and transparent coalition...before firing a shot? Yes.

[Heyo]

16. I stand firmly on the.....

..."No, he was an egregious human rights abuser who had to go, one way or another" reponse

Which fits what I have thought since 1991.

Heyo

[Dirk39]

17. This poll is for perverts:

It's as if someone hears that a guy is slapping his children - he knows very well, 'cause he supported him in doing so.
Than he invades his home, rapes his wife, kills his children, steals his money.
And then he asks: do you support child-abuse?

Those who ask the questions are in power, those, who answer are slaves.

Hello from Germany,
Dirk

[0rganism]

26. Hey, you can put it in whatever context you think appropriate

If you think "the guy is slapping his children" but the matter could be adequately handled by police, or resolved by a stern talking-to, then say so.

[Dirk39]

30. No, I can't.

This isn't a game, this is history. And the context is the illegal and criminal invasion. Maybe I can put it in whatever context I think appropriate, sitting here in my safe european home, but the people in Falludscha can't.

What would you say, if terrorists would have invaded the USA, toppled the Bush govnerment, make sure that they get the profit from everything worth it, kill, murder and rape 100.000s of Americans and install a puppet regime. And then they start a poll: do you think, the Bush-Gang should have stayed in power in the USA?

That's the difference - not to mention, that before these "terrorists" or "freedom fighters" have financed and armed the Bush regime,
Dirk

[0rganism]

35. I could answer that poll, easily: No way

We're going to try like mad to do get rid of the Bush-Gang in November without your hypothetical terrorist invasion.

No, they should not have stayed in power. Like Saddam Hussein, they shouldn't have been allowed to come to power in the first place.

Is it so hard to figure out?

By the way, I'm tempted to start exactly your hypothetical poll as well.

Edit: I began a poll along the lines of your proposal. Let's see how it turns out, eh?

[kiahzero]

19. Smart sanctions could have taken him out

Instead, we imposed a sanctions program that made it more likely he would stay in power.

So I voted "No, he was a human rights abuser" because, well, he was.

[JHBowden]

20. America has the right to intervene.

I voted that we should have left SH in power, given Hussein was a component for regional stability.

If Hussein actually had WMD, I would agree, he would have to go. However, in the absence of a threat, it made no sense to pull the inspectors out. Promoting democracy in that country ends up empowering anti-American lunatics like al-Sadr. Splitting the country into three pieces creates problems with not only Sunni resentment, but Iran and Turkey. Leaving Hussein in power but constrained by the no-fly zones strategically was the preferable option.

I do disagree with the notion that we can't attack illegitimate nations. If there is an immediate ethnic cleansing problem, a near immediate WMD threat from an illegitimate nation, or harboring of international terrorists, American intervention is indeed justified, UN or no UN.

[Dirk39]

25. What?

Then why do you still stay calm: I think you should hurry up to attack and invade your own country: it is governed by terrorists, it is arming, harboring, producing, financing and supporting terrorists, it has WMDs, it is illegitimate in every way possible.
Please, please invade yourself and leave other countries alone.

Hello from Germany,
Dirk

[JHBowden]

29. The United States is a Democracy.

While GW Bush is a few french fries short of a happy meal, comparing him to Kim Jong Il or Saddam Hussein is over the top. There is a difference between legitimate nations like the United Kingdom and France compared to illegitimate ones such as North Korea and Cuba. In addition, when there is ethnic cleansing going on such as was the case in Yugoslavia, intervention is indeed justified.

[Dirk39]

39. And they hate "you" for your freedom...

to murder 2-4 million people in Vietnam

to arm and support someone like Saddam Hussein, who is "worse than Stalin and Hitler" (Bush)

to have a free press that allows the majority of american citizens to believe that 100.000 vietnamese people were murdered, that former freedom fighter Saddam Hussein had WMDs

that Iraqis were sitting in the planes that attacked the WTC and Hussein had links to Bin-Ladden (an all american product)

to start about 300 illegal wars since the end of WWII

to help and support the nazi-elites to remain in power in Germany after Ausschwitz: the police, the military, the economic and the political elite, the intelligence, except for those, who were imported to the USA to protect your democrazy from evil communists.

to believe that ethnic cleansing was the reason to invade Yugoslawia

North-Korea must be a liberal democrazy compared to that amount of brain-washing taking place in North-America....

As long as Fox-TV and the corporate financed "political" "parties" do the job and the american citizens are stupid enough and kept calm with the gods stolen from other countries, it's a formal democrazy.

Dirk

[drumwolf]

22. The question isn't so much "Should he have stayed in power...."

... but "should we have deposed him in the way that we did?"

And the answer to THAT question is a very loud, resounding and unambiguous NO.

[0rganism]

27. How about in the greater scope of all possible ways of removing him?

In other words, even if the end of removing Saddam wasn't enough to justify the means of invasion, were there other practical means which would have been justified? Maybe, maybe not, what do you think?

[TahitiNut]

23. Interesting. Is it possible that a UN success in defanging a dictator ...

... was inimical to the Cabal's agenda? Has not the UN been the bogeyman of fascist right for decades? I can very easily believe the prospect of a widely-recognized UN success in this regard was at least part of the motivation for an invasion.

[Hubert Flottz]

24. I don't believe Saddam would have lasted this long if.............

the GOPers had not sold or given him his WMDs years ago! The GOPers helped make Osama also! The Reagans, Bushies and other GOPer Globalist Do-Gooders have done more for terror than they have against it over the past 35 years!(the GOP is For Terra, Against us) The GOPers Always start wars and NEVER fight in them!

[markomalley]

28. He was the leader of that country...

...and we had no right to depose him. Maybe this isn't a good example, but, even though we are all agreed that Ronnie Rayguns was a dangerous and perverted individual, would the USSR have been correct in "liberating" the US in the 1980s? Saddam was no worse than Rayguns -- what right did we have to "liberate" his people from their leader??

[0rganism]

32. I suspect the counterargument would be...

...that Raygun was potentially removable by uncoerced election, whereas the Iraqis couldn't have voted Saddam out. Practically speaking, the USSR couldn't have "liberated" us from Raygun by invading -- indeed, under-armed as Iraq is, we're having quite a bit of trouble with liberation ourselves. Can you imagine the Soviets trying to occupy the USA?

Niether can I. However, it was possible for a military invasion of Iraq to remove Saddam. You don't think we had a right to do so, and others apparently disagree. Some might point out that we didn't have the right to prop his regime up, either.

[markomalley]

45. Of course it would have been ludicrous....

...for the USSR to liberate us. And that is the point. And of course it would be ludicrous for the Soviets to have tried to occupy us. That is exactly the point. These people are not ignorant savages needing "education" from their big brother. Their culture is far older and more refined than ours will ever be. So who are we to arrogantly go over there and "teach" them? And, as far as propping up his regime...if that was truly the case, then the people over there wouldn't be constantly trying to kill us, since we would have "liberated" them, would they? It's apparent at least to me that they loved the regime they were under and would prefer to be under it again. It's their country...we should let them do as they please.

And, as far as "removing" Rayguns by an uncoerced election, we saw how well that worked...it didn't. Most American people that I know are very progressive, yet the 1984 election was rigged so that he appeared to win in a landslide. His people stuffed enough ballot boxes to get him almost every state against a very viable, progressive candidate (Mondale). The same as happened in 1988 and in 2000. So, we really see how "elections" work, don't we?

[Hubert Flottz]

47. When was the last time the US had an uncoerced election?

The UN needs to step in and pimp slap Debold! Are you a Mountaineer yet 0rganism?

[cureautismnow]

31. Follow Up Questions to the "No's"

Would YOU HAVE PERSONALLY been willing to die to remove SH from power?

or

Would you have been gung-ho to send your own sons, daughters, husbands, and wifes to their deaths in the pursuit of removing SH from power?

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

BTW, SH turns 67. Not 27, Not 37, not 47, not 57, but 67. Life expectancy in a "3rd world country" would be ....?

Let's hope the pawns in Shrub's diabolical game, live to see 67, also.

[JHBowden]

33. I don't defend the "No" position, but

our military personnel know the risks of their profession. To be brutally plain about it, their trade is killing people.

[FlashHarry]

34. We shouldn't have invaded, but I'm glad he's gone.

How's that for middle-of-the-road?

[0rganism]

36. By the way, here's how I answered the question in the other thread

Contra Media: "Do you believe that Saddam Hussein should have been left in power?"

0rganism: Even though you phrased it as passive-tense, it's well worth serious discussion. But we have to put it in context, to do so without indulging false dichotomies.

See, you posted several articles which present honest-to-goodness real-life humanitarian reasons to overthrow Saddam Hussein's totalitarian regime. But instead of referring to those documents in supporting an invasion of Iraq, the bush administration saw fit to roll out mountains of false and misleading allegations to "make the case for war". Only post-invasion, now that the WMDs are proving to be just as gone as the UN inspectors said they were, and the bogus linking of Ba'athists with Al Qaeda has been shown to be so much bullshit, is the administration resorting to humanitarian justifications for its actions.

We knew for decades about the murderous crap that was going down in Iraq, Saddam's role as a bloody dictator is well-documented, and all this was allowed to happen -- even encouraged by Reagan and Bush Sr. Why did these atrocities suddenly start to matter in 2003?

The simple answer is that they didn't: human rights violations are seldom taken as a sufficient justification for unilateral action. If we were really concerned about human rights violations, we wouldn't have propped up regimes like Somoza's and Batista's and D'Aubisson's and, yes, Saddam Hussein's. Right now, there are numerous regimes committing serious humanitarian offenses, some of which are well known to have WMDs, which are permitted to continue as usual; if humanitarian interventions against countries were our hallmark, we wouldn't be selling weaponry to Israel. American foreign policy has been driven by profitability since its inception; as long as Saddam was useful as a point of regional stability, his regime was tolerated. After all, it had been crippled after Ambassador Glaspie invited Saddam Hussein to invade Kuwait -- had our government so desired, we would have supported the Shi'ite and Kurdish uprisings during Gulf War 1 and taken Saddam down then and there.

Instead, we LET Saddam put down the insurgencies with his Republican Guard and evolved a sanctions regime in the name of "containment".

No one makes the case for this better than Bush Sr. himself. He points out that Saddam Hussein, for all his flaws, was preventing a three-way civil war and a genocidal invasion by Turkey. Now Saddam is gone, and we've inherited those problems in full. The administration went into this process without a sound plan, apparently believing its own propaganda, and now we're starting to reap a whirlwind.

So your question is if I believe Saddam Hussein should have been left in power. I don't -- but then, I don't believe we should have put him in power in the first place. I also think it's becoming abundantly clear, even to some rightwing imperialists, that a unilateral invasion and occupation by the United States military was not the best way to accomplish his removal. And the administration's abundant lying to the American people in order to trigger this suboptimal, ill-planned invasion is a grievous crime that places our national credibility in jeopardy.

Ideally, we would have let the Iraqi peoples depose him themselves. Then, the UN could have intervened to mitigate their civil war and assisted in the formation of a legitimate parliamentary demo/theocracy suitable to the region. In no way should the bush administration have "gone it alone" and marched into Iraq with only token support from a handful of bribed non-regional allies, let alone lied to the people of the USA -- and, indeed, the world -- to do so. Now that we're there, we face the other half of the question you asked: "what would be an adequate, feasible replacement for the Ba'ath regime?"

As before, the answer is non-trivial. I suggest you ask your congressman what his plan is.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=109x8260

[Codeblue]

37. Hmm

I dont agree with any world leader committing such grievous human rights atrocities as Saddam committed for so many years. However, he WAS holding the country together whether Americans like it or not. Now we are seeing what could easily have happened had Saddam been deposed earlier, except now we are in the thick of it.

Also, with all the Iraqis fighting us now, it is just inciting more hatred for America in the region, which means that the region is much more dangerous now than it ever was with Saddam in power.

[0rganism]

38. Interesting. No one (so far) thinks Iraqis were incapable of revolution.

That's one of the main justifications applied by the invasion apologists in the name of bringing "democracy" to Iraq, so I'd think at least *one* person would believe it.

This has been a fascinating poll.

[Matilda]

40. It would have been worth while agreeing to lift sanctions

in return for improvement in human rights in Iraq.

Under Saddam, health and education standards were amongst the
highest in the Middle East, and it's now clear that only a very
tough man could hold the various elements together - and I'm
sure the Iraqis would prefer their tough guy to the Americans'
tough guy.

All that was needed was for more religious tolerance towards the
Sunnis, and a strict control of Saddam's secret police (and
of Saddam's sons).

It might have worked, and would have been preferable to what is
happening now, and what lies ahead.

[MetaTrope]

41. It's never too late

[Feanorcurufinwe]

42. I couldn't see the difference between 1 and 5

so I voted other

[0rganism]

44. it's a difference of responsible agency, I think

If you think the USA has the right to pick and choose governments in some circumstances, but the Iraqis were still capable of sorting out their own problems, then #1 is for you. If you think Iraq was indeed a failed state but the USA has no business going in and setting up a government of its own choosing, then maybe you're looking at a #5. If you think that Iraqis were capable of sorting out their own problems and the USA had no right to intervene, then definitely go with a #10 and say "combo".

Or just do whatever. :)

[Only Me]

43. I voted Yes, because

We do not have the resources to police the world. I believe in human rights, but do not believe it is the 'duty' of our government to try to force our will/culture on anyone else. Especially if it isn't wanted.

[Vladimir]

46. The question is misleading

To the question: should the US have removed Saddam from power, the answer is clearly a no. To the question: should the US have supported Saddam in power, the answer is again no. The people of Iraq should have been allowed to get rid of their own dictator, and this facilitated by the lifting of sanctions.

[0rganism]

48. But that's part of the challenge!

You see, by phrasing the question in anonymous passive tense, we're able to dispense with all that unnecessary clarity that makes right-wingers so uncomfortable.

[eridani]

49. People have been known to overthrow dictators all by themselves

The Iraqis came close in 1991, but Bush the 1st intervened on Saddam's side. He was seriously losing touch with reality, and I don't think he would have stayed in power all that long.