>>Why? You seem to be supporting the position of how much better Iraq is now. Why did we have to do that at the cost of 2,000 US lives to date, with thousands of other permently injured/maimed?
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>I do, and I will continue to do so. Regardless of whether WMD's were there or not, Hussein went to a lot of trouble to convince the world that he still had them. He was a threat, pure and simple, and needed to be removed.
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>Yes, it has been costly, particularly to the Iraqis. But ultimately it will have been worth it, when they finally come out of the tunnel. Is it worse off than when we first went in? Depends on who you talk to. Hussein killed hundreds of thousands of his own people. That threat is no longer there. The Iraqi police and army are getting better at defending themselves, and will eventually overcome the terrorists that are being imported by Syria and Iran. Better we fight them there, than on our own soil.
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>>All of the worse-case scenario predictions have come true for the middle east region.
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>Uh...no, they have not. I don't know what worst-case scenarios you think have come true, but the Middle East (outside of Iraq) is same same from before we went in...a cluster of unstable dictatorships with unguided revolution festering in the population. Except for Lebanon, which I have high hopes for.
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>The Islamic extremists hated us before...before Iraq, before Afghanistan, before 9/11. And they will continue to do so unless the imbalance between haves and have-nots over there is solved. Democracy is the only way that the Arab street is going to get a grip on their problems. Someone has to help them build it.
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Dan, I recognize that reasonable people can disagree. But I could not disagree with you more here. In what way have we improved things in Iraq? In what way is there more democracy than there was 2.5 years ago? So we forced a sham election that confirmed the ethnic/religious percentages of the Iraqi population. This government will not hold and the country will dissolve in civil war the moment we depart. Some accomplishment.

It was foolish in the extreme to think that a mistrusted foreign power would introduce democracy to a region that has no tradition of democracy whatsoever. At gunpoint. Oh, THAT will sway some hearts and minds.