The guy was no saint but we had him contained and a little fine tuning on the sanctions combined with serious threat of force could have done us a lot more good than reducing Fallujah to rubble IMO.

We've gone backwards.

Dude: you fail to get my main point: the greatest point of control we have is in modifying our own behavior. By all means police the hell out of the borders but going into debt to invade a country and just amp up the hatred?!? That's going to work? I submit it hasn't and it won't.

I'll go along with that. Let's start by learning how to get by w/o being by far the biggest consumer of a hot button item: petro.

No, he was not contained.

1. There were numerous companies, mostly European but some in the USA who violated the sanctions
2. The French, Germans, and Russians were pushing for the lifting of sanctions, the French had already backed-out of enforcing the coalition no-fly zones. Coincidentally, these same countries had violated the sanctions to the benefit of elected officials and appointed ministers.
3. Saddam had indicated that when sanctions were lifted he would resume building-up his military to "prevent aggression from the infidels."

I submit it has worked. So there, nyah-nyah.

In other words, there are roughly two schools of thought on this among the electorate and they are in disagreement. By engaging in a silly-assed "yes it is"/"no it isn't" debate we chase the horsey around the carousel.

He was not only contained, we now know that he was all but disarmed. Are you arguing that European opposition to sanctions justified a full invasion? I would have thought that some less extreme measures could be tried before invading. If the political atmosphere created an environment that threatened us, then we would have been justified in taking military action.

He was NOT contained, therefore the rest of your conclusions are without merit.

Perhaps the loyal opposition has a different definition of the term containment.

Sanctions?!?! Are you serious?...

People like Saddam LAUGH at sanctions.

The UN sanctions did absolutely NO harm to Saddam Hussein... He had tens of millions of dollars (actually probably far more), multiple palaces, complete control over his military (however modest it may have been), an entire nation living in fear of him and his goon-squad...

The sanctions only served to hurt and deprive the Iraqi people even more than Saddam already was. Nothing more.

Mike

Sounds like Cuba and the embargo.

The embargo has not prevented castro from amassing a personal fortune of nearly one billion dollars.

And it has not prevented my favorite car maker from selling its cars in Cuba (to highly placed government officials, of course).

The so-called embargo has only helped to keep castro in power (by giving him an easy excuse) and it has hurt the Cuban people.

Sometimes I think that castro has made some sort of secret deal with the U.S. government.

There you go Carl, I am joining you in the ranks of the conspiracy theorists. :D

Yep.

Our trade embargo concerning Cuba is equally ridiculous and counter-productive.

Mike

And Castro's country is equally contained. How many attacks on others has Cuba been responsible for? It sounds more like the wingnuts seek control rather than peace.

Just for the record, genius, has either party been especially brilliant in their handling of Cuba?

When I'm dictator I'm ordering sanctions dropped. NOTHING would bring change in Cuba as fast as free trade and open travel with the USA.

Bot

Taking steps to strengthen enforcement of the oil sanctions seems to me like it would have been way cheaper than what we've done. Further, as I've said many times, we had inspectors in the country who weren't getting butchered, we could have put in teams who controlled the chlorine needed for water purification in order to keep it away from weapons production and thereby removed at least some of the reason the Shi-ites in the south hated us. We had desroyed many water treatment plants in '91.

We could have arranged for Queasy and Ooo - day to be rubbed out. Yeah, we're not supposed to do that but it hasn't stopped us before and plenty of locals would have been willing to do it.

We could have attempted to tighten the screws to force him to allow resoration of the wetlands. It would have been an international public relatios coup for him.

Big trouble with this approach is it wouldn't have enabled us to build 14 or 15 permanent military bases and an embassy compound bigger than Vatican city.

It's worked has it? With a 50 year supply of munitions buried around the country and a populace in no mood to submit quietly? This bleeding will not soon be stopped.

I said fine tune the sanctions. Libya came around because of sanctions, not because we bloodied Saddam's nose. Most all of the framework for their coming in from the cold was in place before 9/11 even.

Even Kuwait wanted to resume normal trade with the guy, such was his awesome power. In fact, I understand that by '03, Kuwait's military was far stronger than Saddam's.