Tacet_Blue
accidentally being the key word there...not deliberate
But then a war is known to have accidental victims. It's not like the people are going to like you a lot better if you bomb them by accident than if you bomb them on purpose. Relatives and friends (if any survive) may well become the U.S.' latest arch enemies.
You are aware of course that cities like Basra didn't have a decent water supply for years before the UK contingent repaired the infrastructure.
Yes, I am aware of that, and this is partly why the lack of water had such an immediate impact. However, in the end it might be worth it.
as opposed to the reports of the millions that were dying during Saddam's reign. Some people refuse to believe in the mass gassings, and I'd also like to point out that the latest terror attacks in Iraq have been against Iraqi policemen in an ambush..not US soldiers.
Well, the 100.000 were estimated to be extra compared to the regular death toll that Saddam's reign was responsible for. A lot of people were killed by the secret police, locked up, and so on, agreed. And I'm also not going to say beforehand that the Iraqi people are worse off as a result. It may well be that over the years after this election, the death rate will drop below it was under Saddam for a prolonged time and make the war worthwhile. It may even be that the Iraqi will consider it a worthwhile price to have paid for their freedom.
But it may just as well be that Iraq will come under a similar (religious or fascist, or combined) dictatorship as some of its neighboring countries, that Saddam was responsible for 'only' a at most a few thousand political assassination per year, and thus the price of knowing for sure that Iraq was WMD'less would turn out to be 100.000 civilians, a slightly smaller number of soldiers and baáth people, a thousand-plus U.S. soldiers (plus some allies - remember, we have troops there also) and a few hundred billions of U.S. dollars on the wrong side of the year budget.
Certainly not Arwin
although sometimes you do seem to focus on the "all war is bad" philosophy without looking at the bigger picture yourself.
When the war started I was one of the very few in my social circles who didn't outright dismiss the war as an atrocious, terrible act. I don't like Saddam, and I was worried about France holding out too long. Although I was sure that France would eventually cave in (trust me, they would have), I read that the sand storm season was starting soon and that would make the war a lot harder and cause many more causalties. In short, I wasn't automatically dismissing the idea (which is my natural reaction anyway when others around me seem to do so on instinct).
But looking at the facts and purposes of this war, I'm a lot more worried today than I ever was, that the war was a bad idea at the time. Waiting until the U.N. would have given the all-clear would, in retrospect, have been the best idea as the policy has turned out to work and Blix and his team had done their job properly. I know that its easy to look at these things in retrospect, but taking everything into account, I think it's a bad idea, and I also think the Bush administration overplayed its hand and should have known better.
In the end I'm probably more worried about the possible negative effects for the U.S. than the effects on the world economy or to the Iraqi people. For the latter, there is at least still hope that the War will bring them a better life eventually, but for the U.S., I'm afraid that spending even a quarter of the money spent in the Gulf war on PR and the rest on internal issues would have had a far more positive effect for its citizens, and even doing nothing with the money might well have turned to be better.
I do try, you know, to look at that big picture.
