bouzane said:
Mr Khan said:
The poor job of nationbuilding in Iraq is the big one, although to be fair to us Americans, Iraq is really a country that shouldn't exist as a cohesive political entity, but it was too tall of an order for the US and coalition allies to partition the country outright.
A stronger dose of federalization should have been the better idea; more local control for regional governments to help ease sectarian tensions.
Iraq is definitely better off without Saddam. It's not like the Iraqis themselves could have overthrown him peacefully (it's not a homogenous society like South Korea or Chile, who overthrew their dictators peacefully). It would have been just as bad as Syria had Saddam's downfall come endogenously.
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I can agree with everything you said except for the bolded. Under Saddam Iraq was a highly productive nation that enjoyed relatively good education, healthcare, infrastructure and a secular legal system. He may have been a statist (something I oppose) but it may have been a necessary evil as it prevented the spread of Islamofascism. My biggest gripe with Saddam was the warmongering and that's hardly an uncommon policy :(
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Warmongering and lots of internal torture and extrajudicial killings, not to mention brief spurts of genocide like the gassings of Kurds and Shias in the 80s. It wasn't a pretty place to live, either through the 80s in the war with Iran, and then after that the country basically fell under perpetual siege after the disastrous First Gulf War.
I can agree that the Baathists and pre-Baathist republicans that ran the country after the fall of the British-backed Hashemites did many good things for the country, but they did so by papering over the ethnoreligious differences through force and fear of force, which is ultimately unsustainable.
Iraq may have been better off for *enduring* Baathist rule, in the sense of what the Baathists brought, but removing it had to happen, and if you compare what has happened in Iraq to what has happened in Syria, it wouldn't have gone well in any direction.
