I do not support bribing mass murderers

[Scriptor Ignotus]

and I can't believe so many DUers seem fine with it. First off, it's unrealistic - no US President would EVER get caught doing this. Bill or Hillary Clinton wouldn't, Edwards wouldn't, Obama wouldn't, and you better believe GWB would never do it. Second, Saddam was an evil, barbaric man with blood on his hands. It would be totally immoral and completely unacceptable to pay him off.

Now, every DUers will try and compare the costs of bribing Saddam to the invasion and occupation of Iraq, but that is a false choice. There were other ways to get Saddam out of power, such as assassination.

Third, even if he left, the Baath party infrastructure remained. It's not like Saddam was the only bad guy in Iraq in a position of power.

Saddam's crimes against his own people and Iran's are not fictional Bush Administration propaganda. These things are well documented. I post this not in defense of the war, but to slap down this ridiculous notion that Saddam could have or should have been paid off. There were other morally acceptable options.


reposted regarding:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/09/26/AR2007092601024.html

Bush thought Saddam was prepared to flee: report

By Jason Webb
Reuters
Wednesday, September 26, 2007; 12:07 PM

MADRID (Reuters) - Saddam Hussein was prepared to take $1 billion and go into exile before the Iraq war, according to a transcript of talks between U.S. President George W. Bush and an ally, Spanish newspaper El Pais reported on Wednesday.

During a meeting at his ranch in Crawford, Texas, on February 22, 2003, Bush told former Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar that Saddam could also be assassinated, according to the transcript published in El Pais in Spanish.

[annabanana]

1. He was taking HIS OWN MONEY. . . .. .n/t

Are you saying that it was better to invade iraq?

[KharmaTrain]

4. His Money???

And how did Saddam earn this money?

I have mixed feeling about if Saddam had taken the cash and run...as I would have rather seen him gone into exile instead of what we have now.

[Ghost in the Machine]

6. people are failing to comprehend that part... n/t

[Scriptor Ignotus]

16. please read further than my headline

when you respond. that's a "false choice" and that much should be obvious.

[rfranklin]

2. So, instead we destroyed Iraq and created chaos...

Very responsible and very moral. You, sir, are the one that is ridiculous.

[Scriptor Ignotus]

18. did you just blame me for the Iraq War?

[gollygee]

3. It would be immoral and unacceptable to pay him off . . .

therefore we have this war? Is this war moral and acceptable?

IF we ever leave Iraq, which I doubt, someone worse than Saddam will take his place.

But of course we'll never leave and they will be occupied forever. I bet they'll love that too.

How many innocent Iraqis have we killed? How many did Saddam kill?

[Amonester]

5. Someone (a lot) worst than Saddam took his place 4.5 years agp:

[annabanana]

7. "the Baath party infrastructure remained"

And what have been the ramifications of the complete "de-bathification" of the infrastructure? Is NO infrastructure an improvement? Or perhaps that cadre of Bremer's Kids was a really good idea?

[Scriptor Ignotus]

19. this is why we should never have invaded

because you remove Saddam and you still have no viable government in place. Whether we kept the Baathists or not, Iraq would still be a mess.

[Spazito]

27. It is even simpler than that...

You should never have illegally invaded Iraq BECAUSE it was a sovereign country who did NOT attack the United States nor was a threat of ANY kind. All the rest of the excuses including yours, imo, have no relevance.

[Cessna Invesco Palin]

8. I dunno.

A billion dollars sounds like a small price to pay for sending Bush and Cheney into exile.

[LeftishBrit]

20. I'd be prepared to cough up a bit extra in taxes, to have the UK contribute to the fund for that!

Just so long as they didn't come HERE!

[cali]

9. How noble of you.

Not. And yes, of course it's preferable to avoid genocide by letting one man go into exile. That's NOT a false choice. You can't say that this is something others wouldn't do. You provide no evidence for that. And what fucking right does this country have to go around the world assassinating people?

[Scriptor Ignotus]

24. well let's focus on GWB because he had the choice

his father invaded Iraq and Saddam was his nemesis. You really think W would just let Saddam slip out into the night after he tried to kill his daddy? We invaded Iraq partly because of this son-father redemption plotline. Letting Saddam go into exile was never an option with Bush, and by your post I think you agree, so I don't know why anyone is upset that we lost an "opportunity" to avoid the war.

Also, Saddam already committed his crimes so you would be letting someone get off the hook AFTER the genocide (of the Kurds). Not too mention the torturing and killing of however many dissident Iraqis over the years.

[kdmorris]

10. This assumes

that is was our "moral and acceptable" duty to do anything with Iraq. They were a sovereign country and I don't think we had any business bribing him, or assassinating him or anything else. The crimes that Saddam committed were done originally with weapons we supplied to him. Do you even remember the picture of Donald Rumsfield shaking hands with him? Do you know what he was doing there?

If you feel it is our duty to go around the world and remove "bad guys" from power, then we need to start with some of our allies, before we move on to other countries that we do not consider our allies. We will need to invade Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, China and Uzbekistan, just to start with. Remember, THEY are our allies. THEN we can move on to North Korea and Iran.

People in this country were lied into thinking we had to "do something" about Iraq. We didn't. There were no weapons of mass destruction. There were no nuclear bombs. After it was shown that Iraq was no longer a threat to anyone, they started talking about the murders he committed. Murders that he committed under the Reagan and Bush 1 regimes, with their consent, using the weapons they sold to him. They just left out the part about Bush's Daddy helping to kill all those people, as it's inconvenient to have to invade Maine.

I don't think he needed to be bribed. I think NONE of this should have happened. It's all immoral and unacceptable. There were other ways of dealing with him, LIKE exile (with or without his own money. He wasn't asking US to give him a billion dollars. He wanted to take his own wealth) or continuing to sanction them, although sanctions mainly hurt the Iraqi people. But none of that fit what Bush wanted. He wanted to control the oil, so they kept spinning this as if it was a good thing, grasping at the latest straw to make an increasingly unwilling populace allow them to continue funneling our treasury to their friends in the defense department industry.

[madokie]

11. I couldn't read the whole post as it sickens me

so you are saying you are fine with killing thousands and thousands of Iraqi and Afghanies. sorry but I'm an ole Vet who doesn't see it that way at all. I say to you go by way of the doo doo

[Scriptor Ignotus]

21. yea, i'm a psychopath who loves to see innocent people slaughtered

spare the hyperbole. there were other options besides: 1) let Saddam go into exile or 2) invade.

[madokie]

29. you said it not me

sure there were and leave him the fuck alone was one of them. how does killing solve anything anyway? Oops, never mind I really don't want to know, ok.

[Scriptor Ignotus]

32. leaving him alone was the best option

or more accurately, the sanctions, no-fly zones and weapons inspectors we already had in place.

[w13rd0]

12. Your "outrage" with "so many at DU"...

...is completely without foundation. The $1 billion wasn't money we were giving him to leave. And furthermore, what do you think the deals with North Korea are about? That's bribery. So you'll have to forgive me for scoffing at your "outrage". George wanted a war, regardless the cost or consequences.

[Scriptor Ignotus]

22. we would let him leave with $1B

so what's the difference? It's probably our Oil for Food money anyway. I see it as a de facto bribe.

We shouldn't have invaded Iraq and we shouldn't invade North Korea. I'm aware the CIA "bribes" nefarious individuals and governments around the world. I reason it gets us into as much trouble as it prevents.

[spanone]

13. i am for anything that deters war....bribery sounds good to me

[charlie]

14. Assassination

Like the way we assassinated Qaddafi? Wait, we didn't. He's still running around in his Vegas Revue disco outfits. We did manage to kill his daughter, though. And we didn't really try to kill him, we just made a bombing run that was unfortunately too close to his tent, since doing it on purpose would violate the Executive Order signed by the Gipper himself.

So, what are these other "morally acceptable options"?

[Scriptor Ignotus]

17. not invading would be the optimal

using a multi-national force to invade and/or provide peacekeeping would be second.

[tekisui]

15. Don't forget *'s public ultimatum when he told Saddam and his boys

that they could leave the country within 3 days to avoid an invasion. He had already rejected that option. All he wanted was war. And the De-Baathification was possibly the biggest mistake in a long line of big mistakes. So, puhlease.

[alfredo]

23. It would have put him outside his security perimeter. Liquidating him

would have been a lot easier in Cairo than Baghdad.

[ljm2002]

25. Me too...

...it's much better to become a mass murder yourself and cut out the middle man.

:eyes:

[jpgray]

26. And your realistic superior alternative for removing Saddam would be...?

[CT_Progressive]

28. The country you live in does. And has. Often. Just FYI.

[Scriptor Ignotus]

35. I read Confessions of an Economic Hitmen

I know.

this country does a whole host of things I don't approve of, and not just since GWB came into office.

[Kelly Rupert]

30. Yes, that would have been far worse for the Iraqi people

than the war and chaos we've unleashed.

[Scriptor Ignotus]

34. and how would the Kurds react to us letting Saddam go? -eom

[warren pease]

31. Disagree completely, and here's why...

If you simply want to compare dollars to dollars, $1 billion is less than $1 trillion, which is one estimate of the total cost of the Iraq genocide thus far. And, with the help of our fine anti-war Congress, that number can only rise.

But all government money is political. This particular $1 trillion has enabled several of the US Right's long-standing objectives, which go far beyond funding the occupation: It has put the New Deal mostly out of business because we're told the pentagon's voracious appetite must be served first to "keep us safe."

It has accelerated the transfer of whatever remaining wealth the poor and middle-class possessed into the pockets of the upper 1 or 2 percent, whether through the tax code or through devaluing the dollar (the rich, of course, adopted the Euro or just bought more gold long ago, so they're unaffected by devaluation of the buck) or by leeching jobs out of the economy or by forcing people to sell their houses (often to rich speculators, of course, who can afford to hang onto the properties until the real estate market heats up again) to avoid bankruptcy.

This $1 trillion has also served to increase the wealth and power of the financial sector of the economy -- which is to say, the paper pushers and short-term profit-takers and currency speculators -- and whose interests have absolutely nothing in common with the average person just trying to keep from drowning in this riptide of money rushing offshore. In fact, if you watched Moyers' show last Friday, you probably noticed that the interests of the short-term profiteers and those of the working stiffs are absolutely and unalterably in opposition. Another case of the rich declaring war on the rest of us, and winning yet again.

So how does this whole Ponzi scheme play out? Speculators buy a manufacturing or service-providing business, lay everybody off, sell off the infrastructure, and immediately show a profit because there are almost no remaining expenses but there's still an incoming revenue stream generated by net-60 or longer payments on prior contracts.

Meanwhile, another viable business disappears into the financial sector, never again to produce a single widget, offer another service of provide another job. The former employees are screwed, their pension funds (if any) are plundered with no accountability or governmental oversight (another BushCo legacy) and their lives generally spiral downward because the overall US economy has been hijacked by hedge fund managers who were apparently born without any semblance of a conscience -- just another bunch of very rich sociopaths constantly taking and never giving back, and laughing about it all the way to that numbered account in Taxdodgistan.

So anyway, that's the dollars to dollars comparison carried out to the 23rd decimal place. Basically, it would have been far better for the US economy to just let him keep his $1 billion than squander a $1 trillion on this insane occupation.


As to the moral element of the argument, I'm a bit amazed that a seemingly rational person is balancing the ethics of bribery against the ethics of mass murder and infrastructure devastation. Somewhere between 600,000 and more than a million Iraqi civilians have been killed as a result of this disaster. About four million more have become either internal refugees or seekers of asylum in Syria, Jordan, Lebanon and even the US (which has generously accepted about a thousand of the people it converted from skilled professionals into homeless beggars). And many of these four million are said to be upper middle class types with advanced educations and valuable skills: doctors, engineers, researchers, scientists and so forth -- exactly the kind of people you need to rebuild a crippled country.

And they're being driven out by, on the one hand, the US military and assorted hired thugs from the mercenary supply companies and, on the other hand, by the non-stop sectarian and ethnic violence that kills hundreds, if not thousands, each day. Sensibly enough, they're worried they might be next in line for a roadside bomb or a quick bullet in the head.

And who's left when it's finally time to rebuild? The unskilled or semi-skilled, the bombers and snipers, the fascist thugs who hide their savagery behind religion, low-level bureaucrats co-opted by the US -- these will be Iraq's version of the Founding Fathers, and not a Jefferson among them most likely.


Then there's this foolishness about Saddam being "evil" and "barbaric" -- compared with what, exactly? The sociopaths who removed him? Ivan the Terrible? A great white shark? Of course he was a barbaric thug. Most dictators fall into that general category.

GW Bush, Cheney and the rest of the PNAC werewolves are also barbaric thugs. How does one choose a favorite in such company? It's just another false dichotomy -- like the old line about if you don't like the US move to Russia. Personally, I don't like either place at the moment and would vastly prefer, say, New Zealand, Sweden, France or a number of other places that aren't the US or Russia.

Same false dichotomy here; Bush has adequately demonstrated to the world that he's just another murderous thug with designs on Iraqi oil who will kill anybody who gets in the way. Saddam was a mirror image: yet another murderous thug who killed anybody who got in his way. As far as I'm concerned, an imperial presidency and a totalitarian dictatorship have far too much in common. A pox on both houses.

So that's a hell of a fine choice there. Not being Thomas Aquinas, I can't figure it out from a moral standpoint. But I know bullshit when I smell it and the attempt to rank despots as if they were college football teams is just ridiculous.

Here are a couple of other things I know. The US has absolutely no business deciding unilaterally to "remove" a head of state from a sovereign nation that posed no immediate threat to the region, much less to this country. This was an immoral, unjustifiable, genocidal resource grab and an excuse to implement the PNAC's "full-spectrum dominance" vision for the US' long-term role in the Middle East.

If the bribery issue is factual (and I really have no idea or vested interest either way), then a $1 billion trust fund is considerably cheaper than a $1 trillion (and counting) occupation with no end in sight. And it's sure as hell cheaper than the amount of industrial strength solvent we will all have to use to remove the blood stains from those vast numbers of Iraqi civilians who have been killed or maimed in our names and with our tax dollars.

No matter how much solvent, our collective hands are going to be a little reddish for a long, long time. I only hope these treasonous monsters don't pull the trigger on Iran, because that little adventure is going to make Iraq look like Sunday in the park.


And I see I've gone over my self-imposed word limit for rants on DU. Well screw it. I think this needs to be said.

wp

[Scriptor Ignotus]

33. the Holocaust was well under way when the US joined WWII

let's get hypothetical (btw - I enjoyed your post - it was logical and well put) to figure out where I'm coming from. If the US could have paid Hitler $1B (or let him keep $1B of Germany's money - it's almost the same thing in my mind) to go into exile before we invaded it would have saved however many trillions of dollars and millions of lives. A cost-benefit analysis would have shown that to be the obvious, easy conclusion - just as you write it above.

Here's the rub - the United States of America would have paid to let Hitler get away with the most heinous crimes imaginable. History's greatest villain would be living in luxury the rest of his days.

The US had other options than this - they could contain Germay, invade, assassinate, support Britain and France, support resistance fighters in Western Europe, etc etc.

Do you see what I'm trying to get at? Saddam is not Hitler, but his crimes are well known. The invasion of Iraq is obviously a worse outcome than letting him go into exile - however - these were not our only two options. We could have launched special forces raids, assassinated him, or done any number of clandestine things to stop him, capture him or kill him. Can we compare the Holocaust to other genocidal crimes? I'm not sure, but I think we can use it as a good thought exercise to see what makes sense and what doesn't.


Anyway, the entire point is moot, because as I mentioned, George W Bush would never have let Saddam go into exile. He had a hard-on for taking him out, and that's what was going to happen.

[warren pease]

36. Two points come to mind...

One, it seems to me as though you assume the key objective of the whole Iraq adventure was taking Saddam out. So the choices in that case would have included any number of options, as you say above.

However, imo this whole disaster had very little, if anything, to do with removing Saddam, who was well-contained and relatively harmless to the rest of the Middle East, and certainly to the US. And while I agree that Bushie himself is both stupid and crazy enough to commit an entire country to a unilateral, "preemptive" invasion and subsequent occupation of a sovereign nation that happened to be led by a relatively toothless thug who just happened to be linked to a plot to kill Poppy Bush, the "realpolitik" assholes like Cheney and his PNAC cohorts would never have allowed such a move for such an idiotic reason.

The original acronym for the invasion said it all: OIL, or Operation Iraqi Liberation. It was quickly renamed to some other psy ops happy talk gibberish lest the obvious connection register on our narcotized but hyper-patriotic citizenry -- and after the administration and its functionaries had enough time to roll in the aisles laughing until the tears flowed.

Oil and "full-spectrum dominance" were and remain the reasons for the US presence in Iraq. They're not building an embassy the size of Shea Stadium, as well as a bunch of new "permanent" army and air force bases, just so they can leave any time soon. As the PNAC advised in "Rebuilding America's Defenses," the 2000 neocon manifesto that also wished for "a new Pearl Harbor" to galvanize public support for a massive military buildup, diplomacy has been replaced with militarism and its targets include anywhere on earth that the US deems a "threat to national security," which is to say, if "our oil is under their sand."

And as to Hitler, I think in retrospect anyone who fought in or lived through the European war, complete with the radical switch from only attacking military targets to focusing significant bombing capabilities on civilian populations, would have loved to see a billion dollars materialize just after the 1933 Reichstag fire to bribe Hitler to go away and live in peace, harmony and untold splendor until he died from natural causes at an advanced age.

Perhaps another billion or so to spread among the Goerings and Himmlers and Bormans and Heydens, along with a few thousand US dollars each for the brownshirt enforcers, would have been a good investment as well.

In fact, I'm beginning to see the next wave of diplomacy looming just ahead: the use of bribery to get rid of emerging tyrants who future constitute threats to peace and justice and sanity before they can accomplish their twisted objectives. Can you imagine how much better off the world would be today if, instead of forcing BushCo to connive and steal and invade its way to vast fortunes, the UN or some other international entity would have just slipped a couple of extra billion into Bush and Cheney's pay envelopes right before the first Patriot act was introduced and then sent them off to Bushie's 99,000 acre tropical paradise in Paraguay?

The "punishment" hardly fits the crimes, but they get their wish and I get my reward, which would be not having to endure and subsidize these filthy sociopaths for the past six years.

So... a couple of billion to keep the vampires away; or a trillion and counting to let them feed on the corpses they've created. That's a pretty easy choice from where I'm sitting. Talk about cost/benefits and risk/reward ratios.

I think international bribery is going to be the happenin' thang, as we used to say when we were busily mangling the language back in the '60s.

What do you think?


wp