Quote from BlueHorseshoe:
1. The bottom line is that the Bathists murdered parents in the street and held the children in prisons. Reports are that the bathists sometimes granted sadists access to the children before they were killed, or were made to kill each other. Some atrocities are simply unspeakable. There is my bottom line.
The REAL bottom line is this:
America was frustrated by its failed efforts to combat Al-Qaeda and make Bin Laden pay for 9-11, so the Bush Administration created a phantom threat in Saddam Hussein. He's an Arab and he's bad so he's the next best thing to Bin Laden. Bush claimed war against Iraq was necessary because Saddam was a "uniquely evil" dictator who had gassed his own people.
North Korea's "Dear Leader," Kim Jong-il, with his alarming bouffant hairdo, pot belly, and weird, khaki jumpsuits, looks and acts like an alien from outer space. His Stalinist regime, with whom Bush wants to negotiate, has just allowed two million of its citizens to starve to death in order to amply feed and supply the Communist party and the military, and conduct secret nuclear and missile programs. Hundreds of thousands of North Koreans are in prison camps. North Korea has kidnapped Japanese citizens, bombed civilian airliners and committed many other acts of aggression and terrorism. Iraq's atrocities are nothing compared to these.
As for Saddam gassing his own people - meaning Kurdish rebels during the Iran-Iraq war - Bush's outrage is brazen hypocrisy. The U.S. and Britain supplied Iraq with its chemical and biological weapons, financed Saddam's aggression against Iran and made no protests when Saddam used such weapons.
Why did Bush choose to liberate Iraq from a brutal dictator while pussyfooting around North Korea? Because North Korea has no oil and is not the target of powerful U.S. domestic lobbies.
Can you see the double standard? Better to create a straw bogeyman in Baghdad, reckons George Bush, and then triumphantly knock it down, than to tangle with those scary North Koreans.
North Korea has a tough, million-man army that has considerable defensive power in spite of obsolete equipment. They have repeatedly threatened to "burn" Seoul and its seven million inhabitants, as well as the U.S. 2nd Infantry Division on the DMZ, with chemical and perhaps biological weapons. In 1993, the Pentagon estimated that a full-scale war with North Korea would cost U.S. forces 250,000 casualties.
The pentagon believed that the Iraqi war could be completed in 30 days with modest casualties. Plus, it would improve Dubya's popularity by showing that he's a man of action who's avenging 9-11 and combating terror, while ridding the world of evil dictators. But in post-war Iraq, the administration has bitten off more than they could chew.
Granted, the Iraqi people are much better off now than they were under Saddam. Improvements to their standard of living are being made every day, but the liberal media just glosses over them or ignores them altogether. Regardless of these benefits, the premise behind invading Iraq was faulty.
No, I don't live in France. I'm a proud American and a free-thinking Republican who just doesn't agree with everything the Bush administration does. I believe the truth should be revealed.
