Was Saddam a brutal dictator for a reason?, page 1
Pages: <<  1    2    3  >>
ATS Members have flagged this thread 0 times
Topic started on 8-5-2004 @ 10:40 PM by Hoppinmad1
Well this will probably piss some people off. Obviously Iraq has been full of corruption for decades looking at the massive amount of weaponry found there. And being a oil rich rich saddam could have made his country one of the greatest in the world. But....

Saddam as brutal as he was maintained control of a very hostile population for decades. I don't agree with a lot of what he did don't get me wrong. We have 135,000 troops there who cannot control the population there and we can't even control our own troops as shown with the prison situation.

Iraq will have a better future but I feel the best thing the u.s. could do now is admit they are wrong and hand over control as they did in falluja. The hostility there came to a halt. They don't want a government set up by the U.S. and I don't blame them. They are a different people and a different culture.

I recently talked to a infantryman who came back from Iraq and he said the only thing that you can do to the violent iraqis to make them understand who's in charge is to throw lead their way. Their religion has many fanatics and those fanatics if they were in our society would be strictly even hostilly treated sometimes.

Saddam was wrong in alot of ways but I thing you gotta be a brutal nut when you have a coutry full of religious fanatics armed to the teeth. Well thoughts will be appreciated.

EDIT aug 28 2004
This post has been inactive for awhile but I would like to see if anyones opinon on this has changed and also would like to get the opnions of the many new members. Now the situation is even worse there and these individuals heading groups of rebels and each is vying for power. It has been a power struggle in iraq for decades and will continue to do so after the u.s. is gone. The culture is full of extremists and they only understand extreme measures.

[edit on 29-8-2004 by Hoppinmad1]


reply posted on 8-5-2004 @ 11:20 PM by junglejake
This...assumes the Iraqis are less human then we, in "1st world" nations are. Look at the American population. We have people living here from every nation in the world. We also have every ideology in the world, and are creating new religions daily. America has far better potential for having the most violent uprising the world has ever seen, neighbor killing neighbor because to some degree we all disagree with eachother.

Typically, however, we do not. Not because we have a dictatorial government, not because we have a petty despot who likes to torture, but because we are free we don't feel the need for violence.

Of course there are exceptions. Look at the abortion debate, we've got people screaming baby killer while murdering doctors, and we have people screaming it's the woman's choice as they bash the brain in of someone who feels differently.

Those people are the exception, not the norm. I've become, lately, very anti-abortion, but my mom is extreamly pro-choice. Yet I have yet to take a bat to her head. We talk, discusss, and agree to disagree.

So my biggest problem with this belief that Iraqis need someone torturing and terrifying them just seems bigoted to me. We can have freedoms, but the Iraqis aren't good enough, they're less human, and will react violently to freedom. Hey, so did we when we first got it, look at the whiskey rebellion.

The other arguement is that Islam won't allow freedom. Well, if that's the case, why aren't all the muslims here in america killing everyone since they don't have a heavy hand killing their children when they do wrong?

No, the Iraqis are just as human as we are, and are just as capable of having peaceful democracy as we are. It's something they've never experienced before, and therefor don't know what it entails yet, but they will. It took our nation almost 70 years for the major violent rebellions to stop. Did you know that in congress in the 1800s one entire party in the senate tracked down a senator they disagreed with and started clubbing him? Now, the democratic party has gone so far as to elect a former member of the KKK and put him in a position of power!

So in short, it took America a long while to get used to their freedoms, why should it only take the Iraqis a year, when they lived in a far worse dictatorship then we had before we cast off England's yolk.



reply posted on 9-5-2004 @ 12:27 AM by glee
Originally posted by curme
I think it is easier to understand when you not consider Iraq as one country, but a serveral nations, forced to share the same borders.

The merging of the three provinces of Mosul, Baghdad, and Basra into one political entity and the creation of a nation out of the diverse religious and ethnic elements inhabiting these lands was accomplished after World War I. Action undertaken by the British military authorities during the war and the upsurge of nationalism after the war helped determine the shape of the new Iraqi state and the course of events during the postwar years, until Iraq finally emerged as an independent political entity in 1932.

From a page that tells the history of Iraq
HERE.


So nice to see someone refer to Iraq's history for a change. The problems in the Middle East did not spring full-blown from the desert like Athena from the head of Zeus.

The West helped create these problems many years ago. Before Palestine became an issue.

We forced foreign governments on a lot of the Arab world, giving rulership to Arab families we had been playing footsie with. In many cases the Arab royalty are of an entirely different ethnic group than the people in the country they are ruling.

We pushed for Iraq to become a single united country. And we treated the Iraqis like children who couldn't rule themselves for many years.

The MiddleEast is not all our mess, but the West sure has a lot to account for.

Pages: <<  1    2    3  >>    ^^TOP^^



DEA is Investigating Montana State Legislators Over State Laws
  Posted 12 days ago with 59 member flags
The CIA in Australia: America\'s Foreign Watergate
  Posted 2 days ago with 19 member flags
Who is really behind the birthers and what is their real motive?
  Posted 12 days ago with 11 member flags
ESF and Black op funding.
  Posted 10 days ago with 11 member flags
There is NO Media Bias in America
  Posted 11 days ago with 10 member flags