Absolutely. Saddam and his family were deplorable, but if we are to deplore them, we also have to ask how they got there? Why did the West fund the Kurds against Iraq at the behest of the Shah of Iran, a murderous Tyrant put in place by the US after they toppled the elected president Mohammad Mosaddegh, and why the US funded Saddam against Iran after the Shah was deposed, and supplied intelligence to enable Saddam’s use of chemical weapons against Iran.
So yes Saddam was guilty of mass atrocities, but if we are making moral judgements, we have to ask how he got into the position where he was capable of committing such horrendous acts against humanity.
We should also consider the US use of chemical weapons and the price of which is still being paid by ordinary Iraqi people who still suffer from cancers and deformed babies.
An excellent post cast on Iraq from a US perspective here https://open.substack.com/pub/ralph...-years-later?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
Not sure what you mean here. ISTM that nation’s do not make foreign policy decisions based on morality but on strategic and political considerations, hence it was deemed beneficial to support Saddam, then to depose him and why the Kurds were encouraged to take up arms, then abandoned. Maybe we should have a foreign policy driven by moral considerations, but we don’t. It is a mistake to think that the US is supporting Ukraine for moral reasons, the real reasons are strategic.
Shame we are back to the use of the word “you”. It means I have to respond in kind. You have no idea what I would do under any circumstances let alone the ones you consider here.
Our respective democracies have been frayed for decades for internal, not external causes. Trump in the US and Brexit in the UK threw up threats to democracy that still persist today (and in the UK have grown) and have nothing to do with Putin. The threats to our democracy are homegrown and we would do well to look at those causes before going on any moral crusade.
Besides, counterfactuals are not particularly useful, if Putin had won a quick victory in Ukraine, he would only have been able to declare the final death of Western imperialism if it no longer still existed and a victory in Ukraine would not be sufficient to do that.
When it comes to declaring the death on one ideology and the final victory of another, there were many commentators ready to accept the final victory of liberal democracy at the collapse of the USSR, but this supposed ‘end of history’ turned out to be somewhat premature making such pronouncements redundant