[427TJ]

[ QUOTE ]
I am sorry sir, but with all due respect this war is not about oil. This war is about removing terrorist threats so we don't have another 911. Saddam was a terrorist.

[/ QUOTE ]

Respectfully Tom, and thank you for your thoughtful writing, this war is most assuredly about oil and we'll just have to disagree on that point. And rule by fear? Saddam sure as hell did it but so has the Bush administration. Terror this, terror that, "mushroom clouds." As for "The War on Terror," how will we know we've won? No more terror? The "War on Drugs" = no more drugs? "The War on Poverty" = no more poverty?

I said in my earlier post that Saddam was a bad guy and we all agree on that. He was clearly a terrorist to his own people. A cynic would point out that Saddam knew how to run a country in that part of the world--by brutal repression, fear, and ruthless bloodshed. But, just as Republicans dislike and distrust Democrats, Saddam was very wary of people like bin Laden and the Islamic fundamentalists in Iran and elsewhere (how's that for a comparison). As you point out, he went to war with the fundamentalist Iranian regime for ten years in the '80s (back when Saddam was our buddy). Saddam probably thought of bin Laden much the same way that Dale Earnhart fans think of Jeff Gordon or Rush Limbaugh fans think of Michael Moore. (Similar-looking American men would kill one another given the opportunity! Just joking there to make my point.) Saddam was smart enough to keep an eye on people like bin Laden but he wanted nothing to do with his kind of radical Jihad. Saddam was 100% for the preservation of Saddam and nothing else. If Saddam paid money to families for having their members blow themselves up in suicide attacks, then that was for Saddam's own purposes and not for the greater Jihad against the west. Saddam made a mistake when he went against Kuwait in 1990 and he thus opened the door to a future take-over of his country by America. Had Saddam played his cards smarter after 1991, or even before, he would probably still be in power and selling us all the oil we could consume and he might even be our ally in the Middle East, as he was in a way in the 1980s.

Saddam, one could argue, could be seen as a victim of 9/11 and our thirst for revenge and for oil. The Bush administration was faced with an almost impossible political problem after 9/11 and faced an enemy, al Queda, which was not a uniform-wearing standing army in a geographically defined country where we could just go bomb the s-hit out of the place and score an easy and popular victory, although the Tora Bora campaign was working well until we ran over to Iraq to have our revenge orgy there--and thus let bin Laden go. Saddam became a target on 9/11 (maybe the day Bush took office if you believe that crowd) because the United States had a political problem and has an almost unquenchable thirst for oil.

Saddam's gone and his victims have been avenged but at what price to the rest of us? Again, by your rationale we should go into China and knock-off that repressive government and then North Korea and knock-off that fat bastard, and then...and then....and then... I guess we're going to need that military draft after all.