“Yeah, the war was based on a lie, but Saddam and his followers were sadistic bastards. You can’t not have heard about the atrocities they commited against their own people. No, we didn’t NEED to get rid of Saddam, but it was a good thing to get rid of him. Unfortunately, the follow up was horribly unplanned.”
If there’s no reason to waste so many lives and so much money, then there’s no reason to and it’s a bad thing to do so. If we didn’t “NEED” to go to war, we only did it because we wanted to, which is never a good rationale for war. A war doesn’t consist of just getting rid of the evil dictator. The evil dictator is in hiding somewhere, anyway. War is bringing chaos and death to a whole country on a vast scale. People around here were shitting their pants after that blackout we had, and that only lasted a day and a half at most. One can only imagine the pandemonium if it had continued until now (and if there was no clean water or sewage treatment, in addition), which is <i>exactly</i> what has been going on in Iraq. I wouldn’t inflict that upon my worst enemy. Inflicting that upon a country for nothing more than a <i>lie</i> is criminal. It’s not Saddam Hussein who is suffering from that, it’s all those people he used to lord it over. Who are you to tell them that that’s for their own good? Who are you to determine, without their involvement, what’s good for them? Who gave you that right?
And even if nobody misses Hussein (and some people are missing him because we have bungled the reconstruction so badly), they will still be - and still are, as anyone would gather from looking at the demonstrations - enraged at us for destroying their country and killing their family members. The message we’ve been getting is “Thanks for ousting the dictator, now go to hell.” What is one going to tell them? “Sorry, we know we had no reason to go to war and there was certainly no need to, and we certainly could have avoided it without any negative consequences whatsoever, but we’ve killed these people for your own good, so you should thank us instead of blaming us”? That’s just disgusting.
“In this situation you are right, but after WWII, the U.S. made a significant effort to rebuild the economies of Japan and Germany, and a number of other countries as well I believe. So while the original quote is valid, in the context of Iraq it is so far undetermined.”
It is invalid for the simple reason that it was used to dismiss the current situation. In fact, it is irrelevant to the current situation altogether in all respects.
“Maybe, maybe not. But there is a decree against political assassinations. Not that this has always been followed, but it is there.”
There are even more statutes against starting unprovoked and unjustified wars.
“We got Saddam out of power, now peace needs to be restored, that’s the U.N.'s job anyway.”
After the way the neoconservatives have defied the U.N., insulted our friends for no reason, refused to listen to anyone’s objections, dishonestly broken our agreements, failed to engage in honest discussion with the U.N., lied, spat in the faces of all who didn’t want to give them a blank cheque to do what they wanted, and generally did anything they could do get their precious little war, no matter what, the U.N. has no obligation to clean up our mess.