[somerfrost]

Originally Posted by GenuineRisk

You're absolutely right, Danzig; the fact that it happened a long time ago doesn't make it okay-- my stepmom survived the Pol Pot genocide in Cambodia (her husband, the father of my stepbrothers, did not- he was Muslim, so he was executed. My stepmom was in a labor camp for four years until she fled the country) and while it was a quarter century ago, she still remembers.

That said-- Hussein was a madman, but a secular madman. Which infuriated the religious madmen in the middle East, and, since he was closer to them than we are, he took a fair amount of their focus, which is now longer devoted to him. The horrible part of the question is, did toppelling Hussein make us, here in the US, safer? And my feeling is no; if anything it destablized that region even further and the mess in Iraq is now fertile breeding ground for terrorists who see the US as occupiers. Maybe it will pan out in the future, but I think a different Administration will have to do the panning out-- this one underfunded and botched and didn't plan and frankly, I don't think they're capable of fixing what they started.

So was it worth it? I guess A) the final chapter is not written; time will tell and B) it depends on whether your concern is for people in the US only or people of the world, even at the US's expense. I don't know. I just don't know.

But I tell you what, I prefer my madmen secular. How do you argue with someone whose response is "But God said so."????

Not sure there is much difference...One says, "God said so" the other says, "forget God, I say so"...not much room for debate either way!