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From all the accounts I can see from here, The Iraqi Security Forces have made major gains in Ramadi and recaptured key terrain. The city is strategically and symbolically critical: It sits on the Euphrates and a highway linking Baghdad to the Syrian and Jordanian borders; further up the Euphrates is the Haditha Dam, which generates power not only for Anbar, but other parts of Iraq.
That expresses exactly how I feel.
Ted Cruz said somewhere in the last day or so that the Middle East would have been better off if we hadn’t removed Saddam Hussein.
It is shocking to hear such an ignorant statement from someone running for president.
It is doubly shocking for someone whose family fled from Batista and Castro. Good lord.
What would this have to do with it?
Saddam Hussein was a bloodthirsty sadistic murderer. Estimates of how many Iraqi people he and his sons were responsible for torturing and/or murdering range from 150,000 to 300,000, depending on whom you ask.
It is a good thing that the United States got rid of him.
As for the Cruz family’s experience in Cuba, it was not good under Batista and Castro, and that was why they emigrated to the United States. I would think Cruz would be more sympathetic to the Iraqi people.
You want American soldiers to die instead? Your sons?
I think CB believes that Russia is our opponent here.
Well you have the perspective the rest of us lack, good Sir, – especially about the quality and worthiness of the Iraqis people experiencing this travail – so we hope if you ever want to vent you vent here. Thank you for your service.
You quoted Ted Cruz as saying that “the Middle East” would have been better off (had we not killed Saddam). Not Iraq but the whole ME. That statement might very well be true. Is ISIS not as bad as SH? Would Assad have been fighting and killing his fellow countrymen in Syria in such numbers and with such brutality? Would Iran have this extra lattitude for greater mischief that it has now?
And then it might equally be claimed that the US would be better off had we saved our money and soldiers lives, and even preserved a healthier domestic political climate from all the acrimony engendered by all that waste.
No worries. We have Montenegro now.
Well, it might be interesting to bandy this around a bit in this forum, because when I first heard this comment, rather than read anything sinister into the message like you two folks did, I almost stood up and cheered. Because a perfect response to any sizable terrorist attack against the West orchestrated by ISIS is to nuke them – provide we can find them in sufficient numbers to justify the collateral damage. I could see us getting together with the Russians and agreeing to split the job, they get to nuke 2-3 ISIS concentrations, and we likewise. That way any world condemnation would be equally split.
This strategy, of course, would be only triggered by the event of ISIS inflicting a sizable attack against Western citizens, something we should have contingency plans for by now.
PS. You are right-on in intimating that getting the JLENS technology to work is very, very important for us – for the reason you mentioned.
That isn’t the criterion our country has usually used for going to war. It’s not the reason that Colin Powell gave to the United Nations.
I don’t want to go all Henry Kissinger on you, but it is beyond the capability of the United States to go and fix the things you mention. We can certainly do some good, but war is a blunt instrument not well designed for fixing things.
How do you know he is not sympathetic to the Iraqi people?