As the saying goes, "It's obvious now in hindsight that NFTs are a scam, but to be fair, it was also obvious at the start, and in the middle too"
The US and their allies did do their due diligence. They knew with near-certainty that he didn't have WMDs. All the 'evidence' was purely hypothetical (e.g. he could evade detection by building mobile labs inside semitruck trailers), hearsay from known-bad sources, or outright forged.
Saddam was bad, but no worse than the dictators that the US is neutral or friendly towards.
Since when is inaction "keeping"?
If anything makes the world less safe it's a power vacuum, rise in extremist groups, destabilizing a geopolitically crucial region for decades, torturing thousands, killing millions, displacing tens of millions, setting our international reputation on fire, and laundering trillions of tax dollars through the military industrial complex.
> Saddam Hussein was a huge regional threat to US allies - Israel and Saudi Arabia,
I hate to break it to you, but if you have a thing against mass murder, Israel and Saudi Arabia might not be the best "allies" to bring up... Not to mention the US itself lacking so much as a stub of a leg to stand on.
Regardless - we could have spent all that money achieving energy independence instead of propping up some of the world's most heinous regimes with mass murder and terror. We could have ended world hunger and domestic homelessness with the change. Basically any use of those resources would have been better, and people were screaming this from the rooftops. The world's largest protests were ignored by neocons/neoliberals and the media class, and now we're all living in the consequences.
So, to hear you say the world is safer since the 2003 invasion, I have to wonder: When are we going to tear apart the propaganda machine that leaves people with such ghastly and malinformed delusions? It's been 20 years - we've seen the effects. There's no debate here - it was a monumental clusterfuck, and unfathomably bad for world safety.
That's why ever since - literally every year since 2003 - the world has seen the US as the number one threat to world peace, democracy, and stability. Americans need to start understanding this. The world isn't jealous of us, it's justifiably terrified. Far, far far more than it ever was of Saddam.
Whatever one can say about the Iraq War, Saddam really was a horrible dictator. While the worst of his crimes (Iran war, genocide of Kurds) had been quite a few years in the past, there are many stories even from the late 90s/early 00s which demonstrate it was still a hugely dictatorial and oppressive regime.
I don't think the Iraq War was a good move, for a long list of reasons, but that doesn't mean deposing Saddam was, in principle, a good thing by any reasonable standard.
So to go back to the top post: "America was wrong. Saddam was evil. They can both be true".
I'll go a step further and say: "The Iraq War was a bad idea. Deposing Saddam was a good idea. They can both be true".
You seem to have missed the point of that sentence, apparently by ignoring everything around the words "power vacuum". It was well known that Iraq would be a quagmire and a clusterfuck, for many reasons and not just that one.
> So to go back to the top post: "America was wrong. Saddam was evil. They can both be true".
At no point in any of my comments have I argued that America was right, or that Saddam was a nice guy.
> I'll go a step further and say: "The Iraq War was a bad idea. Deposing Saddam was a good idea. They can both be true".
In the real world, outside of hypothetical vacuums entirely, deposing Saddam was a terrible idea and W's Administration knew it. They said so themselves!
Then they found a way to profit from it. Or should I say, profit again - because it was a lot of the same Admin who sold Saddam weapons and intel in the first place.
Context matters.
No one faced war crime tribunals. Torturers who destroyed Congressional evidence were given promotions. The chief Democrat cheerleader for that war, who blocked key witnesses that could have prevented it all kicking off, was made Vice President for 8 years. And then President. And is running again, despite seemingly not remembering what years he was Vice President. The guy who exposed a small fraction of the war crimes which resulted has been tortured for the last decade.
So. no, I don't think it's very well understood at all.
> repainting Saddam as a misunderstood author who had nothing but a desire to preserve well written Arabic is revisionist and wrong.
That's not what the article was saying. It was saying that Saddam had no WMDs, nor intention to gather them - and we should have known that. We didn't do our due diligence before spending 8 trillion dollars creating a vastly less safe world.
If there's revisionism to be found in tfa, it's that the invasion of Iraq was somehow inevitable; just like, part of that 90's vibe. It wasn't inevitable at all - many people made fucked up choices to make that chaos happen, and the whole world is suffering to this day and for the foreseeable future as a result.
We haven't learned a thing if we're blaming Saddam for all that.