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M M (Lee)'s avatar

Tim, first of all... luv ya, I listen every day. Second, I beg to differ with you on how you view Iraq.

When people advocate for a given issue that the best plan is to do nothing, they are not considering that doing nothing can be as risky or far more risky than taking action.

In the cases Saddam and Ayatollah Khamenei, they were/are the leader of the world's terrorists. If a terrorist gets an atomic bomb, one of the risks is that they will share the atomic bombs with other terrorists. Once that happens, it's realistic to suggest that those terrorists could effectively end the human race and destroy the entire planet.

My point on Iraq is that by eliminating Saddam before he got back his atomic bombs, the U.S. eliminated the opportunity for Saddam to share atomic bombs with other terrorists, which as noted above could have lead to the end of the human race.

With these points in mind, every time I hear you say "but look at what happened in Iraq?", I'm thinking "Yes, look at what happened in Iraq. We eliminated Saddam and prevented terrorists from getting ahold of atomic bombs."

It's also worth noting that Iraq is no longer a menace to the Middle East. And from what I gather, walking around Baghdad these days is safer than most American cities.

I'm not minimizing the disastrous lack of a plan to secure Iraq after the invasion. It should have been foreseeable that Iran would begin fighting a proxy war inside Iraq after the fall of Saddam. And Obama's pulling out U.S. troops lead to the rise of ISIS.

But the outcome of the rise of ISIS was that Arab dictators realized that their true enemy was not Israel or the U.S. but rather terrorists in their own countries.

It could be that when the ayatollahs fall, the new Iran could conceivably become a civilized member of the Middle East in the way that the Saudis and Egyptians today are relatively civilized actors in that region (i.e. non-aggressive militarily).

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DJ's avatar

But Saddam was nowhere close to having the bomb. He later admitted that he had been intentionally ambiguous about WMDs in order to deter Iran. The Iraq War is why we got ISIS and the Syrian refugee crisis. Any assessment of that war has to include those effects.

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