None of them or their families are blaming Saddam Hussein

[Nimrod2005]

Headline from my Internets:

Death in Baghdad: 1,398 civilians killed in May

http://www.cnn.com/

Do you think they are saying, oh Saddam was an ass or a bad person...etc.

These 1398 and the many others, the 100s of thousands (and their families) who died AFTER Bush illegally invaded their country for no reason DO NOT, I repeat, DO NOT blame the so-called evil Saddam for their loss and destruction...They blame one person: George W. Bush.

People were not blowing up every single day before Bush attacked their country, there were no deaths by the thousands before Bush attacked them.

How can Bush's mom and dad live with themselves? How can his pastor live with himself? Do they not fear God? If there is a God? How can God let one person be responsible for so much deaths? How can he sleep at night? knowing that he has sooo much blood on his hands?

I am not him or them, but I am almost unable to live with myself knowing what I know, seeing what I see...This is not simply war, these people are not soldiers, they are normal civilians, and they did nothing to us, they never wished us or our allies harm...!

[Igel]

1. That's true.

But back in the '90s, when Saddam was playing oil-for-food-and-medicine games, the US and Europe was blamed for the (relative) deficit in food, and lack of medicines.

Saddam may want to divert money for his pet projects, he may have requested that things deemed dubious be imported, and he may have insisted on no more food or medicine until he got approval for them. But it was always the US/Europe's fault.

They take the long view and the short view, conveniently leaving out the middle view. The long view only includes the good things they and their group did, and the bad things others did. So does the short view. For the current mess, we have a bunch of invasions, Ottoman policies, British policies, Ba'thist policies, and *. Proximal cause: *. But what's going on would almost certainly have happened anyway. But that's ok, because then we wouldn't feel guilty.

Such countries are like a high school classroom where the students are itching for a fight--as long as the teacher, for my purposes who's also the football coach, is authoritarian and makes everybody obey, not a problem, even for the teacher's pets, the jocks. Come the end of class--and the class is going to end--and all hell breaks loose on the schoolgrounds. And the teacher doesn't do anything to reduce the intergroup stresses, for his own reasons. (In this case, actually continuing the Ottoman policies for personal and tribal reasons.) We've seen it in a few countries now, and everybody can only see far enough back to blame the proximal cause that best suits our then-current politics; which means that the next time it comes along, whether because of outside meddling or internal weakness, we'll again be shocked, and reject actually thinking critically, and saying, "Gee, what's the root cause here?"

The neocons had two primary problems: the first, thinking they should meddle (not a neocon issue, to be honest: Clinton also meddled); the second, thinking that a society that in the '80s was moving away from tribalism continued to do so, and that a deeply tribal society could have anything like Western democracy.

[enigma000]

2. Do you really think they blame only Bush?

I'm not defending the war or the US administration here, but people are responsible for their own actions regardless of other people's actions.

I suspect Iraqis blame the gunmen, the insurgents, the militias, the government soldiers, the foreign terrorists and the criminals who are doing these horrible things first. And the government full of weak politicians. I'm sure they have dislike for American troops and American leaders but they are not the ones doing all of this killing.

If I don't like Sunni Arabs very much, and it is now easier to get away with murder, and I kill one, it would be improper of me to claim Bush made me do it. This was my decision and my actions.

[Nimrod2005]

3. They think it is Bush's doing, because if you were not

an enemy of Saddam, you lived in peace. You woke up, dressed the kids for school, had electricity to cook a warm breakfast, then went on to work...Lived a normal life. Bush's invasion caused all this caos...


I know Bush himself did not make someone set the bomb or pull the trigger, but had the US not invaded, the civilians' lives would not have been like this...