The issue was never to stop or not to stop Hussein and his two sons, but how. A quick decapitation of the govt, and military would have done it. Completely dismantling the whole government and army was a mistake. “Stay the course is a mistake.”
I just don’t get how supposed patriots can justify the killing of 100,000’s of people with “Our intentions were good”. Tell it to the families of the dead. They don’t care if it was a terrorist or Bush and company; their loved ones are gone. Our actions in Iraq have made the United States the bad guy. We have raped and tortured innocents, we are holding hundreds without charges nor access to hapeus corpus, we have kidnapped and “Extraordinarily Renditioned” too many people to claim the moral high ground any more.
It will take years for our men and women in uniform to live down this disaster, and they are the ones who will pay the price. Any backwater country can now ignore the Geneva Convention for treatment of prisoners because the U.S. did. Abu Grabe is not an isolated case of a few soldiers going wild, it is part of a system of interrogation that is totally disregards any human dignity and seeks to generate information at any cost – be it good Intel or bad. Torture anyone long enough and they will start talking about something.