James A. Donald wrote:
-- On 17 Dec 2003 at 22:54, Michael Kalus wrote:
No, but it is very interresting that all of this didn't matter while Saddam was the "good guy" for our causes (and by that I mean the Western world general).
You are making up your own history.
Am I? The west traded heavily with him, be it the US, France, Germany, the UK. Nobody was left out. All dealt with Saddam and made a lot of money off of him.
When Saddam came to power, he seized western property and murdered westerners, especially Americans, and you lot cheered him to an echo.
Who is "you lot"? [...] So in September 1980, Hussein's troops crossed the border into Iran. At first the war went well for Iraq, but eventually Iranian forces pushed the invaders out of their country. By spring 1982, the Iranians had gone on the offensive. And that greatly worried the Reagan White House, knowing that an Iranian victory could have a disastrous effect on America's power base in the oil-rich Middle East. Before long the Reagan administration began openly courting Saddam Hussein. In 1982, the United States removed Iraq from its list of countries that supported state-sponsored terrorism. In December 1983, President Reagan sent to Baghdad none other than Donald Rumsfeld, then special envoy to the Middle East and today one of Hussein's harshest critics as U.S. secretary of defense. Rumsfeld's visit opened up America's relations with Iraq for the first time since the Arab-Israeli war in 1967. Later, Rumsfeld said that "it struck us as useful to have a relationship" and revealed that Hussein had indicated he wasn't interested in causing problems in the world. [...] http://tlc.discovery.com/convergence/iraqwar/timeline/timeline_03.html
Saddam was always an enemy of the west, he was never a good guy.
Does the " mean anything to you? He was our "good guy" as long as we though we could use him.
He was at times an ally, in the sense that Stalin and Pol Pot were at times temporary allies, yet somehow I never see you fans of slavery and mass murder criticizing the west for allying with Stalin.
I think the circumstances where a bit different at this point in time. Besides. Nobody (at least not I) said anything about "supporting" him or "cheering" for Saddam. The Question here is not if he is a bad man or a good man. It is not if he did or did not do what they accuse him of. But it is about the double morale that the west has been advocating for the past 50 years. Especially when it comes to Oil. It is astonishing that it was okay for Saddam to be as evil as be and we (as a society) turned a blind eye to it, until WE (for whatever reason) felt threatened by him and than dragged it all out again, just to proof how bad he is. Face it. If the West didn't want Saddam in Power they could have removed him a long time ago. The matter of fact is, we are as much to blame for what happened to the people in Iraq as is Saddam, if not more so.
Evil men, by their nature, find themselves in conflict with other evil men for the same reasons as good men do.
So where do your enlightened Western Politicians fit in? Good or Evil?
Thus evil men and good men will often find themselves in a temporary alliance of convenience against a common enemy, an alliance that both sides know will end in war or near war fairly soon.
I suggest you read Chomsky's new book, and if only as a reference to the sources he lists.
This however seldom leads good men to mistake evil men for 'good guys"
No, but it leads good men to become evil. If you ally with the enemy than you are giving up what makes you good. Turning away when someone is abused doesn't make the abuse stop and it makes you just as guilty as the one who commits the abuse. Ignorance might be bliss for most people, but from an ethical and moral standpoint it is not. Parading Saddam around and humiliating him just shows how low we really are, despite the fact that we don't want to acknowledge it ourselves. Michael