Defining Picture of the Iraq War

[Y]

Originally posted by: Jessper

Funny, that is the same outlook Great Britain and France had on Germany before it merged with Austria-Hungry and almost took over the world (WWII). They did nothing when Germany broke the provisions of the treaty of Versailles, much like it seems the world would have liked to do for Saddam. I hear that if we ignore history we are doomed to repeat it. I'm not saying the same would have happened (world domination is impossible this day in age, through warfare) but after such a large blunder you would think these "enlightened" countries would have been quicker to act.

Their leaders understood the situation better than you do. Saddam Hussein had no army. His "elite" guards surrendered by the thousands to unarmed civilian camera crews, in both Gulf Wars. There is absolutely no parallel with Nazi Germany as far as military strength goes.

[Jessper]

Originally posted by: Y The Alien
Their leaders understood the situation better than you do. Saddam Hussein had no army. His "elite" guards surrendered by the thousands to unarmed civilian camera crews, in both Gulf Wars. There is absolutely no parallel with Nazi Germany as far as military strength goes.

I know Y. My point was not that Saddam would have had a large enough army to take over Europe if left alone, but rather that Germany was shrugged off much like BoC would shrug off Saddam. I was comparing how people thought both Hitler and Saddam were no threat.

My point is, don't think that Saddam was harmless just because of your preconceptions on his military power. In the early 90's it was much easier to gauge strength (size of army being one of the main contributors back then) than now since nuclear and biological arms are much easier to conceal yet it was still messed up in a very large way. It is foolish to simply assume Saddam had no WMD's because if he did one of them, depending on how large he made the bomb, could devastate an entire country.

Military intelligence is not always accurate (heh, obviously) however, that does not mean that everyone else's information was correct, only that it had a better chance to be.

Leaving an instable person such as Saddam in command was a bad move in my opinion, though I understand the reasoning behind doing so. For the most part, war is not fought for peace but rather stability.

Sorry for being kind of all over the place, but I have a test now so I'm not going to refine it much. My apologies.