Got it. Iraq was virtually crime free, because it was run by a mafia boss. You know there was little crime, because that’s “well-known,” not because there is any evidence you can cite. Now there is widespread organized crime, again unlike when the mafia boss was running things. You also know about the level of electricity production, somehow. Have you heard this from Iraqis? Or is it something ‘everyone’ knows?
Among the people who don’t think pre-war Iraq was covered very well is Eason Jordan, chief of CNN, who wrote in 2004:”Each time I visited, I became more distressed by what I saw and heard — awful things that could not be reported….” He didn’t seem to think the full truth of the pre-war environment was ‘well-known’. Maybe you have better sources than CNN used?
The Sunni and Shia had some degree of coexistence before. On the other hand, Saddam’s Sunni-dominated government killed between 70 and 230 thousand Shia and Kurds after the 1991 war, which I think qualifies as ‘sectarian violence’ (as does the Anfal campaign, which killed another 50-100 thousand Kurds.)
The fact that woefully ignorant people like you continue to slur our government with the unsupported and unsupportable accusations of lies probably helps our enemies’ propaganda. But they want to kill Americans anywhere they can; we’re just making sure the Americans closest to them are heavily armed.
The level of violence is still shockingly high. But it was shockingly high before the invasion. Another factor people like yourself never consider is that Saddam was mortal. If we hadn’t invaded and he died, would there have been no power struggle? Sectarian violence? Al quada trying to gain control? Of course all of those things would have happened, resulting in worse violence without us there to fight it.
And to finish. You claim Saddam was able to stay in power so long because of Reagan’s support. This must be another thing ‘everybody knows’, since that phrase apparently means “something I heard somewhere that is completely unsupported by evidence.” Wikipedia has data from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute on arms sales to Iraq 1973-1990. Guess how much came from the US.
Go on, guess.
Half? Lower.
10%? Closer, but no.
1%? Still too high.
0.5% is their estimate. You might want to tell ‘everyone’ they’ve been giving you bad information (widely known bad information – Peter Bergen from CNN: Various books and multiple news reports have charged that the CIA armed and trained the Afghan Arabs and even bin Laden himself as part of its operation to support the Afghan rebels fighting the Soviets in the 1980s. They argue, therefore, that the United States is culpable in the jihads and terrorism those militants subsequently spread around the world. As we shall see, those charges are overblown and are not supported by the evidence.
One lesson is you should try finding a couple facts before you post.
