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Originally Posted by ArlJim78
You can go ahead and put up the names, but at the same time I want to know from you what should the strategy have been at the time? Who should we have supported, anyone? No one? I know that you can come up with a list of despised dictators but that's not the hard part.
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We have all of these Monday morning quarterbacks here that criticize every move tha the US has made over the years. I agree that the US has made some mistakes over the years. That's not the point. When you are the richest country in the world and you have a stake in the outcome of many global conflicts, sometimes you are forced to take sides in these conflicts. The US has to ask itself what the better outcome would be in each of these conflicts. The Iran/Iraq war back in the 1980s is a perfect example. People on this board like Dalakhani say that we shouldn't have supported Saddam back in the 1980s, but what was the alternative? Iraq was at war with Iran at the time. Our leaders thought about the situation carefully and decided that it was important to make sure that Iran did not prevail in that war, so we supported Iraq. The fact that Saddam became an enemy years later does not mean that it was a mistake to support Iraq back in the 1980s. Saddam was the lesser of two evils at the time. The radical regime that was in power in Iran in the 1980s appeared to be a dangerous threat. The smart thing for us to do at the time was to support Saddam.
I don't know why people like to bring up the fact that we supported Saddam back in the 1980s. How is that relevant to today? It made sense to support Saddam in the 1980s.