re: #371 garhighway

4000+ American servicemen and women would still be alive, as would untold thousands of innocent Iraqis.

Granted, Saddam was an evil motherfucker. But the last time I checked, that wasn’t the test for us deciding to spill American blood and fortune. Else we’d be in a lot of other countries, too.

I said at the end of Gulf War I, and I still believe today, that our biggest mistake collectively, as a nation fighting a just war (or at least one that was plainly in the interests of Empire), was not taking out Saddam in 1991, when we had the means, the opportunity, the motive, and a clear shot. Instead, Bush I caved to wusses in the administration, the U-fucking-N, and his own pusillanimous instincts. Instead of going to Berlin to finish the job, to make an analogy, we stopped at the French border and told the Germans to rise up and overthrow the dictator. We told the Kurds in the north and the Marsh Arabs in the south that we’d have their back, and left them to die by the thousands.

There is a sense in which one can see Gulf War II as a belated balancing of the books.

People say “b-b-b-but the UN would have disapproved, and we would have lost coalition support”, and I say, big fucking deal. It’s easier to ask forgiveness than to beg for permission.