Idiot rightwing columnist asks "Suppose there had not been an Iraq War"

[Adenoid_Hynkel]

From our local version of Ann Coulter:



The average Iraqi would still be living in fear and poverty.

But liberals would call this peace. They would still be standing up for Hussein because, after all, he is an enemy of George W. Bush, and liberals figure the enemy of mine enemy is my friend.

Look at the support Joe Stalin got from the left.
http://dailymail.com/Opinion/DonSurber/200901210494

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They just can't let go. BTW, the guy's a registered member of both Free Republic and Lucianne.com.

[EFerrari]

1. Wow. What an idiot. Both poverty and violence increased in Iraq

after the occupation. I can't believe anyone prints that cr@p any more.

[Lasher]

15. The Daily Mail is a Republican rag.

They've been this way since they were founded in 1914 by Walter Eli Clark, a Republican and the first Governor of the Alaska territory.

Thankfully there's a dwindling number of people willing to drink their koolaid and the paper has been scaled back over the years. It was published Monday thru Saturday afternnon and on Sunday morning until 1961 when the Sunday edition was discontinued. The Saturday afternoon edition was cancelled in 2004. It's just been switched from an afternoon to a morning edition, placing it in more direct competition with the popular Charleston Gazette, which is published in the morning on every day of the week.

Republicans in my home town have always taken the Daily Mail and normal people read the Gazette.

[Tom Kitten]

2. Why just Iraq?

Why don't we go to war with China because aren't they all after all victims of a Communist regime? C'mon guys, let's finish the Cold War once and for all!

[Posteritatis]

6. That's a good way to draw out the real cowards in the GOP about this sort of thing

There's a reason Bush went after Iraq, instead of Iran or North Korea or (God forbid) China - it's by far the weakest, least stable, and least dangerous of the Enemies With Bad PR on the American hitlist. Iran would probably still go down, but it'd be a much, much harder nut to crack, and you wouldn't be able to go after North Korea without a couple of million South Koreans potentially being killed in the first few hours alone. There's others they could've gone after on the humanitarian argument - Sudan, Zimbabwe in the last couple years - but they don't have as much spotlight focused on them so it's politically uninteresting.

The answer to "why just Iraq?" is because it's the only one they "knew" they could take down without getting a bloody nose.

[Tom Kitten]

8. I agree with your general assessment

the problem with these necons is they did not expect the levels of internecine bloodshed after the toppling of Hussein...Sure, most Iraqis were glad to be done with Sadaam but I'm sure they weren't expecting the neocon way of governance over an occupied land...Rumsfeld laughing off the looting of their National Museum, et al...A total disrespect of the people we were supposed to be "liberating"...

[Posteritatis]

11. Oh, absolutely

Iraq went down like a house of cards, and they were correct in assuming it would, but that's different from saying it'd be easy to win the "peace" afterwards.

If I had a gun to my head and was told to invade one of the three, well, I'd soon have a hole in my head, but if I had no other option I'd have picked Iraq. That doesn't make the invasion suck any less, but it was the "safest" of the three, even with what's going on now.

I shudder to think of what would've happened had Bush gone into Iran, even if he did so with an intact US military that hadn't touched Iraq. And I try not to think about a war with North Korea at all.

(Also, as an aside, as an historian-in-training I'm still fuming over the museum. Argh. *sigh*)

[MisterP]

3. it's the late, great Dermot Morgan with chicken teeth

how have we Amerikaner ended Iraqi poverty by Guernicaing them?

[Chulanowa]

4. Sigh. Idiocy is still marching, even without a drummer

Silly dipshit, you have to understand real history before you can write FAKE history without looking like a boob

If there had not been an Iraq war, odds are one of Saddam's kids - my cash is on Qusay, Uday was just too psycho - would have had him assassinated along with the other brother and engaged in another sweep against "CIA and Zionist spies". It would have been a repeat of Saddam's rise to power.

In other words... the net death and destruction is about equal in my mind, invasion or not.

[rpannier]

5. And they're living in what now?

Oh, that's right...

The Christian minority, for the most part, has fled to Syria or Jordan

The Sunnis and Shiites live in separate neighborhoods isolated from one another

The Kurds have set up a mini-Kurdish State in Nrthern Iraq that the central Government has little-to-know control over. To the point that Iraq nearly found itself at war with Turkey.

Yep...so little fear, so much happiness

[YOY]

7. And Don Sturber wouldn't have a chin...still

n.t.

[Beartracks]

9. Weird logic

Not wanting to attack/invade a country that had not not attacked/invaded us = "standing up" for that country's leader.

Hm. Weird logic.

[depakid]

10. Several hundred thousand Iraqi's would still be alive

tens of thousands of Americans wouldn't have been killed, horribly maimed or destined to suffer from PTSD the rest of their lives..

...AND

America would be 2 trillion dollars wealthier.

[JVS]

12. "The average Iraqi would still be living in fear and poverty."

Imagine that!

[Downtown Hound]

13. Off hand I'd guess that Don Surber's nose is bigger than his brain

And that rug of hair sure don't look real to me.

[Caliman73]

14. Right wingers can't make the connection that if there were no war in Iraq

that most likely the US would have continued to pursue Osama bin Laden and he would be in custody now facing trial. That the world would still be sympathetic to the tragedy of 9/11 and many countries, heartened by the capture would be participating in policing terror groups more effectively. Let's see, we would still have the over 4000 men and women that we have lost in Iraq. They would be alive and still in service to our nation. We would have about a trillion more dollars in the economy. Our armed forces would be rested and ready with sufficient equipment to respond to any threat to our security.

I don't remember anyone saying that Saddam was anything but a thug and tyrant. I have seen no one defending him. I have seen people standing up for international law such as...the idea that it is illegal to attack a sovereign nation without provocation or the threat of imminent danger. As others have said, there are many countries whose leadership the US does not approve of. We have not attacked, China, North Korea, Iran, Myanmar, Venezuela, or Sudan. All of these are countries which the Bush administration has said were repressing their populations. Why then in Surber's logic, have we not attacked and toppled the governments of these nations? Everyone deserves freedom? or is it only countries that we thought would not give us too much trouble on the battlefield?

Furthermore the notion that the war in Iraq is won is ridiculous (that maybe should have been my first point). What we have in Iraq is a country in ruins, with very little infrastructure, very divergent populations that distrust each other, who are just waiting for us to leave in order to fight for control of the country. Why is it that these idiots always say we "won" or "are winning" yet never have a good definition of victory. Iraq is a war that should never have taken place. Regardless of what idiots like Surber think is happening there, the ends do not justify the means.

[eauclaireliberal]

16. Well for one thing, Opie

There would be less amputated soldiers freaking out your wife and kids when using the pool at the fitness center.

[treestar]

17. Hundreds of thousands would still be alive

Al Qaeda would be contained.

We would not have lost the respect of the world.

We would not be in debt.

And we would not have had any other terrorist attacks. That is BS.

[Juche]

18. Torture is worse in Iraq than it was under Saddam

Not because of US forces, but because of Iraqi forces and all the small factions fighting for control.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/5368360.stm

Saddam was a monster and the sanctions, in which Saddam denied humanitarian aid to Iraqis so that people would blame the US for death in Iraq were horrible. The idea that things are peaceful now is just stupid though. He obviously chooses to ignore the news.

FTR, in the last 8 years the dictators of Liberia and Chad have been brought to justice. You can promote human rights and democracy w/o spending trillions on an unnecessary war based on lies that kills hundreds of thousands of civilians and creates a civil war.