Quote Originally Posted by Poopadoop View Post
Does it matter? The total number of civilian deaths are estimated as 182k-204k. Since it was 'us' who started the war, it's 'us' who is primarily responsible for the resulting deaths.
I really hope we aren't going to spend a day in 2018 talking about the Iraq war. You say it was "us" who started the war. Fuck you.

We made a pre-emptive strike against a hostile regime. It doesn't matter necessarily that they didn't have WMD's. The intelligence suggesting that Hussein was TRYING to procure such things, has never been disproved. He also had a relatively powerful army with plenty of chemical and biological weapons, and had no problem using them. That's not "our" fault.

Pro Tip for you dictators out there. When you start getting 95% of the vote....the world is gonna get a little suspicious of what the fuck you're up to.

And don't start with the "Iraqi people didn't want us there". That's bullshit too. There were plenty of slaves that weren't thrilled about the emancipation proclamation either. Just because Saddam kept the Iraqi trains running on time, doesn't mean he should not have been removed.

The western world, led by the US decided that it was going to war against Islamism. Where is that coming from? Is there a country in that region that A) Borders all the others B) Is home to the two largest rivers in the region C) has prime access to major seaports and D) has enough natural resources to sustain wealth.

^That's the kind of ally we need if we're going to run a successful campaign against terrorism. Obviously we don't want to go around conquering countries for this purpose, but if said country is occupied by someone we can reasonable remove...so be it.

You see, at this point we were working under the progressive assumption that "not all muslims are bad". So we assumed that most muslims would embrace democracy, and be glad to be free. As it turns out, most muslims are bad. And huge numbers of them carried out an armed insurgency to try and seize power after Saddam was deposed. And even though they were dying by the thousands, the muslim civillians didn't really do much to help us. They were just like..."yeah, fuck the west, we want Islam, kill the infidels"

There's no fucking way the world would be a safe place, if we allowed a violent insurgency of Islamists to take over a country like Iraq.

So sorry if it got messy.

In 08, Obama was elected, and he pulled us out fast. ISIS came. That pretty much proves that staying in Iraq was the right thing to do, even after we learned that Saddam had no WMD's.