You sound really depressed dude. You need to look on the bright side every now and then.

And by the way, the climate apocalypse is not coming - so relax.

A couple of points.

You say that Saddam’s murder rate went down after Gulf War 1. I don’t accept that. he killed between 150,000-300,000 people in the Shia south of the country after they rose up against him. Ok, ok, he stopped gassing the Kurds and invading countries, but are you really saying that a little bit less genocide is ok?

You also say “When groups of people who have nothing in common culturally or historically are swept up in a single country that creates a big challenge for any government to hold the situation together. Saddam held it together with brute force. If he hadn’t, someone else would have.”

But Iraq is mostly Arab, so they have that in common. They are also Muslim (albeit split between Sunni and Shia) and it was all part of the Ottoman Empire until the early 20th century. So I just don’t accept that they needed a dictator to hold the place together.

Finally, how can you say Iraq didn’t threaten anyone after Gulf War 1? Saddam ignored 14 UN binding resolutions and broke all the conditions of the 1991 armistice, he gave $25,000 to the families of Paletinian suicide bombers, he fired on US and UK aircraft in the no-fly zones, he had a huge WMD program uncovered in 1995 when his son-in-law defected, he tried to assasinate Bush Snr in 1993, he massed his forces on the Kuwaiti border in 1994 and only backed down when the US mobilized forces more quickly, he kicked out UN inspectors in 1998, he corrupted the UN oil-for-food program. Want me to go on? Surely all that stuff mattered.

If I undressed you from your wage-slave clothes, as I’m about to do, you would find a slave-child stuck to every thread and button of your lovely fine garb. There are more slaves in the world now than at any other time, it’s just they are largely invisible to the civilised, and we call them other things like child workers. But they’re there, they all exist, 150,000,000 of them, it’s just you have to feel that punch land right in your guts to feel them.

I have to say, you are not very good at joining the dots. Women, equal status? What a lovely utopia your head on legs inhabits.

Healthier lives? We are a culture of diabetics, chronic illness, cancer sufferers and depressives. These are all pathologies of civilisation. Modern science and technology is the very reason why Indian farmers have been suiciding en masse (yippee! Monsanto - go team Tamas go!), why Australian top-soils have been reduced to a mere 1% humus in just 200 years (dust bowl agriculture - Green revolution - go team Tamas go!), why most of the world’s genetically modified crops are failing, why we have a massive carbon and methane pollution problem, why synthetic contaminants in factory farms are producing things like swine flu, why dioxins pollute every river in the world, why 90% of the world’s large fish have been systematically vacuumed and will never recover, why giant islands of plastic waste inhabit the seas. I could make this list as long as you needed, but Tamas, you really need to open your eyes a bit more before you accuse people of holding a flawed argument.

Modern science and technology aid aggregate-growth economics (which as ecological-economists know is uneconomic and unsustainable). Aggregate-growth economics have destroyed over 90% of wild ecologies, systemically it aids population. Intelligent humans and non-humans do not bred past the capacity of the landbase. That is almost everyone except for us.

We’re all very unwell Tamas and self-enslaved, just some haven’t sensed it yet; we’re still getting high on an era of pop-fascism.

Also, you seem to keep mistaking the nation which manufactured the weapons Iraq used with the nation that funded them. The US paid for the French weapons used. I suspect they didn’t pay for the Soviet weaponry. The article I referenced makes many many references to the US funding the purchase of non-US weapons. The only reason you keep banging on about the French is to smudge the argument and I’m not falling for it.

The fact remains that countries like Iraq (see my first post on this page) face struggles of the type we’ve never seen in Australia. When groups of people who have nothing in common culturally or historically are swept up in a single country, that creates a big challenge for any government to hold the situation together. Saddam held it together with brute force. If he hadn’t, someone else would have. Democracy is made all the more difficult when certain groups feel they’re on the receiving end of a worse deal than other groups, and in Iraq this has already led to much bloodshed. I genuinely hope Iraqi democracy succeeds and the suffering ends. I am pessimistic about this actually occurring because it fails most of the time - Yugoslavia collapsed when dictatorship ended, too many African nations have done the same, India split at independence in 1947, the list is very long. Dictatorships which have successfully transitioned to democracy are generally much more homogenous than Iraq.

Finally, if Saddam was ever ‘a danger to the world’, he certainly wasn’t after Gulf War 1. The suggestion that he had any power beyond Iraq’s borders in 2003 has not been borne out by anything discovered since the US took control of the country. You must have missed that press release - the WMD never existed. Unlike many on the left, though, I am happy to agree that the US probably genuinely believed they did at the time of invasion. They still had the receipts, after all.

Really? so western civilization outlawed slavery (an ancient, all-cultural practise), elevated women to equal status, invented modern science and technology and provides healthier lives to its people than any civilization in history, but there’s nothing virtuous about it? Gosh.

You also say “it’s easy to make a monster out of someone like Hussein, in fact it’s regularly necessary in order to divert the attention away from our own deeds and actions”.

Right. So we only condemned Saddam’s killing fields and torture chambers to divert attention from our own, um, what? Which of our deeds and actions rival Saddams?

Your argument is moral-relevance at its worst. And pretty ahistorical too.

I agree it was a mistake to support Saddam against Iran in the 1980’s. So what? The situation by 2003 was radically different.

And it’s pretty cheap for you to say that Iraqis are no better off and they may as well have kept Saddam. To dismiss 25+ million people to that kind of endless brutality is rather easy to do from the comforts of modern Australia. Of course, if we were threatened with that kind of tyranny which is the first country you would expect to help us? I’m guessing it starts with a US and ends in A.

Here’s a well-referenced article about US support to Iraq in Saddam’s heyday:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraqgate

Civilian deaths have dropped since the surge. Deaths under Saddam also dropped very significantly after Gulf War 1 (not that you’d know that from John James post). I remain far from convinced that Iraq is better off for having suffered Gulf War 2. If it’s a stable democracy in 10 years, I may well change my assessment but I’m not holding my breath.

Come on. This is lazy writing. Bush might be a fundamentalist nut, and Rumsfeld might have used religion to push him over the line, but the evidence for your statement is far from complete.

It doesn’t raise any questions about Australia’s participation in the war than have already been asked. John Howard wasn’t a religious nut. He was also a ‘good’ politician. His reasons for throwing Australia into the war would have been more in line with Rumsfeld i.e. profit.

why do people always think that their own country’s actions are more virtuous than others?

let me find that orwell quote…

ah, here it is:

“Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits, but according to who does them, and there is almost no kind of outrage – torture, the use of hostages, forced labour, mass deportations, imprisonment without trial, forgery, assassination, the bombing of civilians – which does not change it’s moral colour when it is committed by ‘our side’”. George Orwell, 1945.

there’s nothing virtuous about industrialised civilisation. most modern australians don’t even know the name of the tribal land their slice of heaven is occupying. it’s easy to make a monster out of someone like Hussein, in fact it’s regularly necessary in order to divert the attention away from our own deeds and actions.

carn, ‘fess up too boyfriend.

….. in Bush’s modus operandi?

And I don’t accept that the Iraqis can’t build a democracy. At least they have a chance to do so now instead of being murdered in Saddam’s torture chambers and killing fields.

And if you don’t think there has been an improvement in Iraq since Saddam was removed from power then you’re not looking very hard. Radical Islamists have killed many people but the ‘surge’ worked and Iraq has a chance to be normal. Good luck to them and good riddance to Saddam.

Finally, you say during the 80’s that Saddam received “massive US military support”. False. The UK and US supplied less than 2% of Saddam’s weapons. All his tanks were Soviet made and the French sold him lots of weapons (and a nuclear reactor) too.

What a load of crap. Clive Hamilton presumably uses a weird throwaway accusation in a French President’s autobiography to substantiate this or he has been watching too much Angels & Demons. The Skull and Bones reference suggests perhaps the later.

Crikey, this type of stuff should be left to the Grassy Knoll column, not the main page.

Bush was a simple man, feeling he had been ordained into the Presidency by his god. In reality, that ascendency was carefully orchestrated by cold war republicans, who then proceeded to install themselves in positions of power so as to puppeteer him for their own ends. And what ends were those?

Well, you can read about it all on their website -
http://www.newamericancentury.org/RebuildingAmericasDefenses.pdf

Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfield, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Scooter Libby, all architects of the Iraq war, and all members of the Project for a New American Century. An organisation dedicated to entrenching America’s global hegemony into the 21st century by launching trillion dollar wars. Can it be called a conspiracy when their intentions and plans are sitting out there for all to see in black and white?

I just know that one day in the future, my family and children will concur with me with the belief that GW2 was WRONG.

Not much comfort for the citizens of Iraq. I am pretty sure the country has been bombed back to the stone age in the past 20 years.

Imagine if the world objected to Kevin Rudd so much they threw missiles and bombs at us - um change that to John Howard

Religion has a lot to answer for.

Good question. There are some people who were involved in the invasion of Iraq who are certainly better off, I don’t think they are Iraqi though.

“Not a single mention of Saddam or the devastating result of his 30 year tyranny: the gassing of the Kurds; the destruction of the Marsh Arabs; the 14 ‘binding’ UN reolutions that he ignored; his corruption of the UN via food-for-oil; his attacks on Iran, Kuwait, Saudi, Israel.”

That Saddam was a bad man is known by all and disputed by nobody. Stop it.