More Morbidity

So Saddam Hussein is no more. He wasn't devoured by a pack of wild dogs, merely hanged. I'm against the death penalty outright but what troubles me additionally about Hussein's situation is that it seems ultimately that we traded almost 3,000 of our soldiers for what, so far, seems to be one man. At present I don't see any other supposed fruit of this endeavor, nor a rationale for it.

What has resulted is that the Iraqi government is now more aligned with Iran than the U.S., the country itself has descended into civil war, the entire Mideast region will potentially destabilize as Iran and Syria side with Iraqi Shiites (al Sadr's Mahdi army and the Badr Brigades) and Saudi Arabia, along with Egypt and Jordan, financially and potentially militarily aiding Iraq's Sunni minority. There is also a possibility that Turkey will invade the Kurdish regions of northern Iraq.

So someone please tell me what glimmer of progress has resulted from this illegal invasion and occupation. Saddam killed 300,000 people in the early 80's (while the the U.S. government looked the other way -- there's that infamous picture of Donald Rumsfeld shaking Saddam's hand three months after committing the crime he was just executed for). International Red Cross estimates put the number of Iraqis killed since the American incursion somewhere around 600,000.

To put that in perspective, given Iraq's population is roughtly 10% that of the U.S., imagine six million dead American innocents.

By no means do I imply that Saddam Elizabeth Hussein was anything less than a monster, but I can't help but feel that the world would be better off were he still in power.

Now back to my game of Scrabble Blast.