Quote:
Originally Posted by beka
See this is what I don't get. Saddam for all of his issues was not an Islamo facist. He's a secularist. I'm not sure why invading a Baathist country is in our best interests...It seems like the only thing we did was actually Encourage religious fundamentalism in Iraq...That's why I don't understand the need to go after Saddam or Syria. Yes, Saddam was wrong in the Iraq war, but you would think that after September 11, the US wouldn't be attacking Secular Muslim countries.
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The reason you don't get it is that it that the premise is wrong. We didn't go into Iraq simply to rid the world of a vile dictator. Toppling Saddam was the popular justification for inserting ourselves smack in the middle of the ME from where we could deal better with a geopolitical threat represented by a long string of acts of terrorism against us.
You cite the usual counter-argument, that our presense has only encouraged Islamic fundamentalists. That's putting the cart before the horse. We didn't dream up the threat. The 'soldiers' of fundamentalism already existed. We had been their targets for a long time before 9/11. After 9/11 we moved the lightening rod from our embassies and homeland into their neighborhood where we're more inviting targets precisely so we could shoot back.
Keeping hands off secular ME regimes makes sense in general. But Iraq wasn't truly Baathist; it was Saddamistic. In any case, for the US, strategically, it is an area of the globe between the two major supporters of terrorism in the ME, Iran and Syria. Our being there complicates their goals no end.