News has come from US Defense Department that the Russians were sending Saddam Hussein information, via the Russian ambassador to Iraq, at the beginning of the Iraq War.
The information turned out to be wrong, but one has to wonder just what the hell is going on? Sure, the US and Russia are not allies like the US is with Japan, England, Canada, or even Korea, but at least they were supposed to be cooperating, if not on the same side.
Sometimes I wonder, did the end of the Cold War really mean anything? Sure, communism is pretty much dead, but the US's two primary Cold War adversaries, China and Russia, still aren't democratic and they still stand in the way of much of what the US tries to do.
And why do you feel the US deserved support on the invasion of Iraq? You don't eat Freedom Fries do you?
ReplyDeleteAh, what a question.
ReplyDeleteI was not happy that the US invaded how and when it did. I was not.
But frankly, the Russian support of Saddam Hussein has nothing to do with that. The one bright spot of the invasion was the removal of Saddam Hussein's murderous—you can not emphasize how murderous—regime.
The time had passed for preventing Bush from invading. If France, Germany, and Russia wanted to prevent that, they should have been putting pressure on Saddam Hussein prior to that. They did not, partially because of fears of upsetting their own oil deals with Baghdad.
No, this was about propping up that murderous regime.
I am not a Bush supporter at all. Not at all. But I see little difference between aiding Saddam Hussein at the beginning of the war and supporting the insurgents right now.
And part of the point of this post was that the US can't exactly afford to go discarding the allies it does have just because they don't fall lock-step in with the Bush Administration's plans. This includes Korea and Italy.
ReplyDeleteThe threat facing free democracies is too great to do that. Despite its faults and the excesses of the Bush Administration, the US is firmly in the free democracy category and it's often then one force that brings other countries over to that side.
Despite the problems there, I still have faith that Iraq will eventually be a stable, self-determining democracy. I don't agree with how we got to that point and I think a lot of mistakes were made, but I can't go back and change that. I campaigned against Bush in 2000 and 2004, which was the about the most I could do, but if I'm right about Iraq's future stability, that will be a result of Bush's vision, and I think it was wrong—dead wrong—for the Russians to undermine the removal of such a dictator.