Quote:
Originally Posted by Professor S
So the average of 50,000 Iraqi citizens per year that were killed or went "missing" under Saddam Hussein are so much more acceptable?
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Is it acceptable in my mind? No. No, Saddam was a horrible dictator, and it was well documented that he killed many of his own people. He deserved the hanging that he got.
It would be interesting to look at some numbers, and see the annual number of Iraqis the US has killed since the start of the war vs. the annual amount killed per year when Saddam was in power. The comparison isn't completely fair, and the numbers should level off in our favor at some point....but it's still an interesting statistic.
I guess we could break the cold hard numbers down with math...but the value of human life far exceeds any statistic. That said, hopefully in the long run the US invasion of Iraq will be profitable to saving Iraqi lives. Aka, hopefully we can establish some law in the country, and hopefully the rival groups like the Sunnis and the Shiites will be friends. Otherwise, as horible as Saddam's dictatorship was, he at least kept some order...even if it was at the expense of tens of thousands of annual deaths.
Life is life, so I won't mention that Democracy is costing us US causalities as well is Iraqi causalities. I'm sure some Americans do not care that thousands of Iraqis were dying in the hands of Saddam - not our problem - and by that logic, we could have avoided the causalities of our own men had we not interfered with other people's business. That argument is valid, because let's face it....Bush isn't a humanitarianism. He's an OILitarian.
If the United States went to go fight for every group of people suffering massive net losses under the hands of a cruel dictatorship...well, we'd be involved with more than Iraq right now.