phatmonky said:
I can bring the entire situation down to a moral issue of "Is it morally right to take lives if it saves many more?"
This is the crux of the argument, despite the many attempts to rationalize peoples' emotions with 'facts' that are innaccurate.
I agree completely. The problem I have is there seems to be an assumption that simply ridding Iraq of Saddam Hussein makes things in Iraq better. The truth is that whatever replaces Hussein needs to be better.
It's tempting to say nothing could be worse than Hussein, but that's ignoring the conditions that put someone like Hussein in power in the first place. The end result could be anything ranging from anarchy with no government strong enough to maintain order, to mini-states fighting among each other (remember the breakup of Yugoslavia), to mini-states that manage to peacibly coexist, to a new, more pro-American dictatorship that holds Iraq together by force, to an effective democracy capable of dealing with the concerns of at least the three or four major Iraqi groups. Absolute worst case could be a third world war, depending how things in Iraq affect Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Iran.
It's hard to see the US abandoning Iraq to any of the worst case scenarios, considering Iraq's oil is so important, but it is a possibility, especially if this drags out as long as conditions would seem to suggest. But most of the 'desirable' outcomes seem equally unrealistic.
The most likely outcome will be some sort of compromise solution that returns things the way they were before we started, but with a friendlier dictator. Can you say "Shah Reza Pahlavi of Iran"? He bought us time (over a decade, in fact), but the problems didn't go away.
This time, though, the situation is different. Buying time will be more effective because we don't have to buy as much. Wealthy Arab nations and how they use that wealth is what will really resolve problems like Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and terrorism, to boot. The smart solution is to prevent the Middle East from blowing up until they change, on their own, to accommodate both the benefits of world trade and their cultural history.
In other words, it really wasn't a question of now or later. They could resolve their own problems if the problems were just pushed far enough into the future. And even if the Iraq-Hussein problem couldn't be pushed far enough into the future to avoid dealing with Hussein, the situation for dealing with him would have only gotten better with time.
