Re: Saddam and the Nazi Party in the 1930's
OkeeDon said:
That's absolutely true, in a generic sense. But, you seem to be saying the opposite; that the USA never makes a mistake, or, at least, if they do, you don't want to hear about it. That ostrich-like behavior is often behind the "holier than thou" pronouncements of the right.
Is it your position that the money, chemical and biological weapons we supplied to Saddam when we considered him an ally against the Iranians, had nothing to do with the resulting situation? The reason why the Bush folks were so certain that Iraq had WMD is because Rummy was one of the ones who gave it to them! It never occurred to them that Saddam might have gotten rid of it; Bush and company certainly never would have, and they ascribed their own motives to the "enemy". It really boils down to this thought by the Bush folks: "If he acts like we would act, he's really dangerous. Therefore, we better take him out, quick."
No, Don. What I was inferring to was that certain people of certain political affiliations have a tendency towards always perceiving that the USA is responsible for a lot of bad things that the USA isn't entirely responsible for. The mere fact that OE stated he thought the whole situation in Iraq was entirely a USA created situation is evidence of this.
My understanding was that the USA sold arms to Iraq at a time when Iran was taking US citizens hostage and doing a lot of other bad things that Iran continues to do today. I'm sure at the time the intent was for the arms to be used against Iran and not to kill Kurds or invade Kuwait. I think that the whole thing was a bad judgement call that I'm sure many of those people involved regret. However, these sorts of things are never black and white and sometimes it is impossible to see just how bad things could get. Hindsight is 20/20 and it is easy for us to look back and pass judgement but it is not something that is productive. The real gain is to use the information we learned from our past mistakes to not repeat them again.
I believe that the current administration understood what sort of animal they were dealing with and to a certain degree knew that this was a mess that the USA was partially responsible for and that the USA had to be responsible and clean up the mess it helped create. I also believe that a lot of other countries as well as Iraq itself were also responsible for the mess but unfortunately few of them were responsible enough to step up to the plate.
I understand that it is would have been political suicide to openly state this but it is something that needed to be done.
I know the following will be twisted against me but I don't care:
Grown people take responsibility for their actions. If those actions go bad then they need to do what is necessary to make it better. I believe this is what is happening in Iraq today. Now there are those people that may choose to be opportunistic and claim that they didn't support any of this in the first place but since this is a democratic society there will always be those people who are in the minority. In my view there is little benefit complaining about the past decisions and trying to hide from what needs to be done to resolve the problem.
So in summary, I didn't say that the USA doesn't make mistakes. What I said is that the USA doesn't get credit for a lot of good that it does and more often gets bashed for the mistakes that it makes.
