"Saddam was a source of instability in Iraq"

[Bluerthanblue]

oh my god--- * is clueless.

He said WE removed the biggest threat to stability in Iraq-

[baldguy]

1. Water, electricity, santitation, safe streets = instability

No water, intermitant electricity, no sanitation, 300 muders a day w/ bombs going off & constant automatic weapons fire = stability

And there are five lights...

[Bluerthanblue]

2. it wasn't a paradise under Saddam- due in large part to

sanctions- but you are right. The necessities of life were there.
Women were free to work in positions that many strict Muslim countries prohibit, they had health care, food, shelter. Were they 'free'? no- was Saddam a dictator? yes- but the country being UNSTABLE???

It's sad when someone with only a HS diploma is as intelligent(perhaps more so) than the president of the US..
:silly:

[Igel]

3. Don't know about 'biggest', but 'a source', sure.

Just as Tito was in Yugoslavia.

Both forced stability; neither created the conditions for stability in the absence of a strong-man state, but instead added conditions for future instability to an already problematic situation. Neither did a thing to ameliorate the tensions they inherited; it wasn't in their personal political interests. The problems they inherited would have gotten worse in any event: The 1940s and 1950s had far less mobility and it was harder for those in one are of even a small country to know what those in other areas had.

But both actively did things to exacerbate tensions, making the dominant group ever more reliant on Tito's/Saddam's power, again, for their political interests, at the expense of other groups. The subordinate groups knew they were subordinate; Saddam was worse, but even under Tito it was clear that the Serb communist partisans were the saviors of Yugoslavia, and not the Nazi-collaborationist Croats or the Bosnians, furnishers of Muslim brigades to the Wehrmacht. Croats/Bosnians were merely paying their debt to Serbs, just as Shi'ites and Kurds were clearly subservient (or toadies) to the Sunni Arabs. In the '90s, however, Saddam worked hard to re-tribalize a country that the Ba'thists had, for 25 years or more, tried to *de-*tribalize; and Saddam openly took sides, strongly favoring Sunnis over Shi'ites, to the point of confiscating Shi'ite mosques for Sunni years and funding a massive public-works/mosque-building project.

Stability in those countries was forced and artificial. Had Tito and Saddam left things as they were, they would have merely been negligent. But they were active forces for instability ... which made them even more "necessary", and even got them praise from weak thinkers.