It's bad enough when you kill innocent people outside your country (and Saddam has been blamed with more than a million), but when you turn on your own countrymen (and women), you're even suckier.Many dictators have done this throughout history, like Joesph Stalin, but I'll pick Saddam to represent the lot of them.
A friend of mine says that Saddam shouldn't be considered on this list, saying he was backed by the US government, but I disagree. I don't believe that our government had a role in the murders he committed against his own citizens or his own son-in-law.
I am not a war monger by any stretch of the imagination and I don't tend to beat the drum for the current administration for the war in Iraq -- but one thing is certain, Saddam Hussein had to be removed from power. The atrocities he caused in the Middle East are reason alone for him to be included on this list, but like I said, when someone is believed to have killed hundreds of thousands of his own people, it's beyond evil.
As I tick off the remaining people on this list, they are pretty much interchangeable, since they have all tried to turn the world into a living hell, but the reason I'm writing about Saddam today is that I just came across this quote in my "Uncle John's Triumphant 20th Anniversary Bathroom Reader" (The Bathroom Reader is a great series of books with quick facts on anything and everything):
"I am sad because my people are in bondage. If I drink water I will have to go to the bathroom and how can I use the bathroom when my people are in bondage." -- Saddam said that when he was speaking with US interrogators, speaking of the occupation of Iraq by the US.
Yeah, I guess it is a lot easier to shake the dew off your lilly or take a crap when you know you're people are dying, not "in bondage."
I just wish the US would have offed Saddam 15 years earlier when we had the chance, so that we could have saved more lives.
RoadRage
5 comments:
The fact of it is that we put Saddam in power in the first place, because our government determined that the country needed a dictator and someone who would help us handle Iran. When you give someone who obviously isn't altogether there in the first place absolute power, that person may abuse his power--just look at our current presidential administration.
I am in no way defending Saddam. He was a dispicable human being. But if you are going to put him that high on your list, you should make it an even tie with the Reagan administration, which placed him in power in the first place.
Smails,
"Various U.S. diplomats and intelligence officials have asserted that Saddam was strongly linked with the CIA, and that U.S. intelligence, under President John F. Kennedy, helped Saddam's party seize power for the first time in 1963" Wikipedia
Your logic would also put JFK on the list next to Saddam.
Each individual is responsible for his own action.
RoadRage,
Good post. I agree with you. The first President Bush didn't get Saddam because of the agreement made with the U.N. Our mission was outlined, there was a plan, and when the mission was complete it was over.
I still don't know what the best method would have been to get Saddam out of power, but the Iraq war has at least assured that Saddam or his even more evil sons will never have power again.
On the other hand, it's been nothing but anarchy over there ever since. The only difference is it isn't one guy killing thousands of people, it's thousands of guys killing them.
There is a school of thought that the only way to keep a lid on all the factions there was to scare the shit out of all of them, and come down hard on those who didn't fall in line. They have lived in fear, but they still do now, and at least they had running water and electricity back then.
Yippee-I-O-KI-A!! Let's go get Mugabe, the war lords in Somalia, The Sudan and Darfur. Oh, don't forget Rwanda. Russia is strutting its stuff again (they get so touchy about Georgia invading Ossetia)..we better bring them down a peg or two. While we are at it, Hugo Chaves and Evo Morales are too big for their britches and socialists too. A world's policeman's work is never done!
What's really ironic about Iraq is Dick Cheney. Years ago he said we should stay out of Iraq because of what is happening now.
Unfortunately we can not know what the future will bring.
It was wrong to preemptively strike Iraq, but what's done is done now and we can't take it back.
That said, Saddam and his sons would have reigned for years to come and if you want to look for a good thing to come out of a bad mistake, that would be the good thing.
The United States needs to butt out of the business of other countries.
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