bhodisattva Defender of Justice wrote:
If you think its okay that only 10,000 people died to impose your idea of Freedom on people that dont want it, i think you might need to re-evaluate your morals.
Not to mention the tens of thousands injured, who lost family, homes etc. If thats how you guys give freedom then your as bad as the people that take freedom away
Um... Where do you get that they "didn't want it"? They did. They asked us to remove Saddam from power. Heck. They practically begged us to. Of course, that was back in 91, when we were in the Gulf war, and could have resolved all of this 10 years earlier.
We even got the Shiites and the Kurds to rebell against Saddam back then. They were willing to put their lives on the line for their freedom from Saddam's rule, knowing full well that they could not hope to be sucessful without outside aid. Unfortunately, the UN declined to do just that. We were not allowed to go into Iraq and remove Saddam from power in 91, and so those people mostly died.
But you wont see the bodycount of those who fought and died for their freedom in Iraq in 91 and 92 and failed horribly as a result of a lack of UN commitment. You wont see it because those sites don't have a vested interest in showing those figures. Just as they don't tell you how many thousands died *each year* in Iraq as political prisoners. Again. They want you to know how many died as a result of the US's actions, but not how many would have died if we *hadn't* acted, and how many died directly because we weren't allowed by the UN to take action 11 years earlier.
Sometimes you have to make the hard choices. It's not easy. And it's not pretty. And it's going to be questioned by everyone. That's why they call them "hard". I personally do not believe that Kerry has the will to make a hard choice. The guy is the political equivalent of a flag. He blows in the wind, and faces whichever way the wind is blowing. He takes the path of least resistance, aimed always at making decisions designed only to avoid upsetting anyone. That's not always the best qualities in a leader. In fact, those are rarely the qualities you want in a leader at all.