It doesn’t take a PhD in Sociology to conclude that Iraq was better off with Saddam Hussein than it is today.
It’s not that Saddam was a great leader without blood on his hands. It’s just that what six US presidents have done to Iraq over the past 35 years has been much worse than anything Saddam ever did to the people of Iraq.
Under Saddam, Iraqis had a thriving economy that included a wealthy middle class, a high functioning infrastructure on par with the most developed nations of the world, and free healthcare and free education through graduate school. Today, Iraqis have an effective unemployment rate of 50%, a difficult time getting water and electricity, and bombed out hospitals and schools.
In Saddam’s Iraq, women’s rights were guaranteed in the constitution, religion played virtually no role in government, Sunni and Shia got along relatively well, and al-Qaeda didn’t exist. Today, Iraqis are facing Sharia law, Sunni and Shia are killing each other, and al-Qaeda in Iraq (now known as ISIS) has become arguably the most powerful non-government force in the world.
Good job, America
The reason Iraq is in the mess it is today is not because of some long-standing feud between Sunni and Shiite Muslims, it’s because six US presidents, spanning ten terms, have created a situation that made today’s Iraq inevitable.
The people of Iraq should be applauded for going this long without imploding. They obviously are more peaceful and have more fortitude than Americans. The United States would be in a state of anarchy if bombs were dropped on its major cities, crushing sanctions were levied that killed hundreds of thousands of its children, they were occupied by a foreign military, a puppet government was installed by another country, and arms were given to Republicans to shoot Democrats, and vice-versa.
But Americans can’t imagine that type of scenario, and they choose not to think about what their tax dollars, their elected officials, and their willful ignorance has done to another civilization.
And to add insult to injury, Americans, particularly Democrats, are essentially quiet now that their president is about to do the same thing to Iraq that five other presidents have already done.
So working chronologically backwards, here’s how six US presidents have destroyed Iraq.
Barack ObamaThe US is at war in Iraq. Nobody wants to acknowledge it, possibly because this is not a war with Iraq, it’s a war inside Iraq.
Maybe people actually believed Obama two weeks ago when he said, "American combat troops are not going to be fighting in Iraq." But on Tuesday it was announced that armed drones and Apache helicopters are being flown by US military inside Iraq.
Since when do "advisers" fly Apache helicopters and armed drones?
Also on Tuesday, The Hill reported that Obama is sending 200 more US troops to Iraq, bringing the total number of US ground forces in Iraq to 750. And on Wednesday, the State Department stated that the Obama administration wants to sell 4,000 more US Hellfire missiles to the Iraqi government.
At what point will "progressive" news outlets like Democracy Now and CommonDreams talk about "mission creep" and Obama doublespeak? It may be a while given they are currently talking about immigration, the NSA and the Hobby Lobby. Important issues, yes, but when your country is starting another war in a place it has already terrorized for 35 years, those issues need to be moved down the priority list.
If a Republican were in the Oval Office it’s a guarantee that the supposed left-leaning media and national antiwar groups would be going berserk, and might actually play a role in stopping the US from going back into Iraq.
But they won’t because their funding largely comes from Democrats, so they can’t go after Obama with the same vigor in which they did with Bush.
Even Kirsten Powers, who writes for the USA Today questioned the integrity of fellow liberals in Wednesday’s paper when she wrote, "Liberals who obsessed over President Bush’s abuses of executive power are suspiciously silent now, or worse, defend the same behavior they found abhorrent in a Republican."
George W. BushNot much needs to be said about what the younger Bush did to Iraq. Based on the lie (not bad intelligence, it was a lie) that Saddam had WMD and was a threat to the US, and on the ruse of tying Iraq to the Sept. 11 attacks, Bush whipped Americans into a frenzy and got them to go along with the invasion and occupation of Iraq.
Bush’s war left at least one-half million Iraqis dead, forced nearly 4 million to become refugees, destroyed Iraq’s infrastructure, and created an untold number of enemies of the US, including ISIS.
Bill ClintonIt was the Clinton administration that first perpetuated the myth that Saddam had WMD. "Saddam Hussein must not be allowed to threaten his neighbors or the world with nuclear arms, poison gas or biological weapons," Clinton stated in 1998 in justifying missile strikes on Iraq.
And even after the Clinton presidency had expired, former Clinton VP Al Gore supported George W. Bush on the issue of Iraq WMD, saying, “We know that he has stored secret supplies of biological and chemical weapons throughout his country.”
But the most extreme form of terrorism carried out by Clinton was with the use of sanctions on the civilians of Iraq that killed 500,000 children. "Medieval," and "unconscionable" were words used to describe the slow, painful deaths Iraqi children suffered due to the absence of food, basic medicines and anesthesia, which the US prohibited from being imported into Iraq.
Clinton’s Secretary of State, Madeline Albright showed the true face of American compassion when she was asked about the deaths of a half million Iraqi children – more than the number who died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki – when she told 60 Minutes in 1996, "This is a very hard choice, but the price, we think the price is worth it."
The humanitarian disaster resulting from sanctions against Iraq has been frequently cited as a factor that motivated the September 11 terrorist attacks. Osama bin Laden himself mentioned the Iraq sanctions as a reason for the attack against the United States.
More...
