Oh good grief, Husnaa! I generally enjoy your posts and consider you one of the best researchers on the board. However, good research is not the same as repeating everything you read on the internet. Google is a tool that needs to be used carefully and discretion. I don't know where you got the following, but you really need to think about this stuff before you copy it here:
1. "The US went to Iraq becos of its oil, bcos it was planning to de peg its currency from the US dollar and tack it on to the Euro, which would have caused massive damage to the US economy." I don't know what you were doing in 2003, or what you were reading, but I'd Google some US newspapers from that time period. Saddam had WMDs at one time (because he used them in the 1990s against both the Americans and his own people). He got whipped by the first President Bush and was required to get rid of them. He wouldn't let the inspectors come in and search freely, so the UN issued resolutions that we used to go after him. Everyone (including the Americans, British, French and the Russians) believed he still had those weapons - Bush didn't lie about that. Where did they go? Syria? Still hidden? After all this time we still don't have the documentation showing they were dismantled. If he had them, or if he got nuclear weapons, he'd be the most destablizing influence in the region.
And let's hear your analysis of how pegging their own currency to the Euro would cause "massive damage to the US economy." How does that work, again? I'm an economist, and I have no idea what you're talking about. In the first place, even if their central bank could do such a thing, there's nothing about pegging a currency to something else that can damage another country's currency. Imports from Iraq represented far less than .001% of US GDP. Besides, the Iraqui currency was never pegged to the dollar in the first place.
However, the next one takes the cake:
2. "Saddam CARED for his subjects." What planet were you writing from when you penned that sentence? The only people he cared about were his own Sunni Baath Party members. Don't you know about the Kurds he murdered en masse? Don't you know about the thousands of Shia he killed? What they have in Iraq now is the beginnings of a democracy. Why are the Arabs so slow in creating democracy? This will make exactly two democracies in the area - Iraq and Israel. (You can't count countries that don't allow opposition parties, as in Egypt and Iran).
3. Yes, he was able to get some infrastructure built, but remember that Iraq was one of the larger producers of oil (not that they produced anything - they just let foreign companies come in, extract the oil, and got paid billions for it).
The bottom line for Saddam was he was a madman who killed thousands OF HIS OWN PEOPLE. Sanctions were imposed in an effort to get the Iraquis to replace this dictator, because he was such a destabilizing factor in the area. This was partly to keep the oil flowing (which helps not just us, but the rest of the world too), and partly to protect Israel.
I agree that Myanmar is a tragedy and I'd fully support an invasion with out troops. I suspect we won't because what happens there doesn't affect us much, but that's the way of the world, isn't it? I'd like to invade the Darfur region because genocide should be stopped, and I would have liked to invade Rwanda, but I guess those places aren't high on our list of areas of strategic importance.
The problem is that, no matter what we do, we'll be blamed by one side or the other. That's the problem with being the big dog - everyone takes a bite as you go by. We can't win in the court of public opinion. So we might as well just do what we think is best, not what others think we should do.
Jack (who CARES for his subjects).
