It would only appear like that to someone intent on undercutting this country and forgetting history.
Given you can't read my mind, imputing motives to me is ad hominem and a personal attack.
Saddam was a brutal dictator who murdered millions of his own people. There i no debate on this.
The highest number I've ever seen is
one million. Which is certainly quite a lot, but does that justify our killing a comparable number? Meddling Halfwit admitted that our sanctions against Iraq were responsible for half a million deaths, though she reassured us that it was "worth it." Since then, the death toll is variously estimated between 50,000 and ten times that number. It's easily foreseeable that before the US is done with Iraq, we'll have killed as many as Saddam--but since we're the "good guys," we can only assume that the million
we kill
needed killin'. Not to mention the couple million people already rendered homeless, either as internal or external refugees. In short, under the best possible interpretation, the cure is as bad as the disease.
But it's hypocritical to use Saddam's badness as a cloak for the invasion, considering that we refuse to invade worse places with greater suffering. For that matter, we ignored his brutality back when he was our guy, and we armed him against Iran. We are obviously not motivated by humanitarian motives.
But the bigger question is the one I originally asked: who died and left us God's corvette? Back when George Washington condemned foreign adventurism, were there no bad guys out there that needed killing? Of course there were. The point is that we aren't God, and is isn't our job to trot the globe righting wrongs, abasing the proud and exalting the humble. Attempting to play God in this way is doomed to failure, even if we have the purest of motives at all times--which we don't.
So to say he posed no threat to us and the US just went in for no apparant reason is disingenuous at best.
"Us" means "the United States." He posed NO threat to us. He probably threatened "our interests," where "our interests" refers to our plans for other nations we have no business interfering in, but he posed no threat to any of the fifty states, whether military, economic or political. He was utterly powerless to project power beyond his borders, let alone get within a thousand miles of any of the United States. We've redefined "threat to us" to mean that if Saddam does business with Bahrain, "we" are harmed.
If we applied to same sort of reasoning in our own lives, seeing the girl next door talking to the pool boy is a "threat" to me, because she might end up dating him, in which case she probably won't be interested in having an affair with me at some future time. Therefore, I shoot the pool boy and drain the pool in "self defense."
--Len.