Let's start off a quote:Iraq is a free of a brutal dictator. Iraq is free of the man who caused there to be mass graves. Iraq is free of rape rooms and torture chambers. Iraq is free of a brutal thug. America did the right thing.
-- George W. Bush, 2003
As the original reasons for invading Iraq fell through -- no WMD, no ties to al Qaeda -- and the insanely optimistic predictions of troops being met in the street by cheering crowds with 'sweets and flowers' proved insanely optimistic, the administration relied more and more on one incontrovertable truth -- Saddam Hussein was a really bad guy.
It's kind of a silly argument. Only about half of the world's nations are democracies and even some of those don't respect human rights. If we're required to act militarily when we know a government is committing crimes, then we've got one helluva lot of work ahead of us -- we can start with North Korea, move on to China, then roll around the world overthrowing governments until we finally go to war with Cuba or Turkmenistan. Of course, that will require a huge sacrifice in lives. As far as the cost in dollars goes, many people would learn numbers they'd never heard of before. "What the hell's a 'quadrillion?' That one of those made up numbers like a 'jillion?'"
Oddly, no one who uses the 'Saddam was evil' argument follows through on it like this. Good thing, too. It turns out that Iraq's rape rooms and torture chambers never closed, they just changed hands. If we were required to overthrow any government that did these things, we'd have sort of an interesting problem -- how does a nation overthrow itself?...
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