Give me the real scoop on Saddam Hussein, Veeky Forums

When a person's identity is tied to their faith and you suppress their faith, you suppress their identity. This typically causes a reaction among the suppressed group whereby they take even greater pains to maintain their culture/religion. Furthermore, even of they are fundamentalists now who gives a shit, as long as they aren't blowing us up.

He was a dictator. A secular dictator focused on modernization and suppression of religious extremism.

The Baath party, his party, was a secular force if I recall right.

Stop being an Islamist apologist

>How am I wrong?
By lying.

The Baath party was just a palette swap of Nazi Germany, and his security services murdered hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians.

He might still have been better than the chaos that came after him.

Blame Bush for electing a bunch of wheelchair level retards to run America's national security system.

The issue is only that the Bush Administration and their military high command decided to force all Saddam's military forces to disperse and disband, if they had not issued those orders then ISIS would have a harder time in Iraq then currently the chaos we're seeing now.

There's layers on layers of this shit.

>generals remind you that it took hundreds of thousands of troops to pacify Germany and Germany wasn't nearly as much of a shithole as Iraq
>ignore them and try to hold the entire country with 100,000 guys
>appoint some retard to run the Iraqi government by mandate, he dissolves the Iraqi Army and spends the rest of his life lying and blaming other people for dissolving the Iraqi Army
>attempt "de-Baathization" of the government when we knew from deNazification that that would cripple the government
>when you finally realize that the country is on the verge of a civil war (it took about a year for the White House to acknowledge this fact) panic and order mass arrests in an effort to create actionable intelligence
>the mass arrests piss off the community, the innocent people in the prison camps get recruited by the actual insurgents who were there, and the drive for actionable intelligence leads directly to highly publicized detainee abuse scandals that inspire an entire wave of jihadists across the Muslim world
>when you finally fix this shit under Petraeus, you have to push so many troops into Iraq that it causes the Taliban to resurge in Afghanistan and reignite the war over there

I may not like 2017 politics, but thank Christ the neocons are finally dead.

>Was he as bad as the picture western media paints of him?

Of course he was a vicious monster.

He was a major American ally after all.

At least the replacement national anthem is better. It had to be good for the hearts and minds campaign.

youtu.be/GBaI26chcFw
youtu.be/tHDOz_G3Plw

that's a rather gross oversimplification of the issue, under Saddam the sunni minority was given extensive privileges over the shiite majority. This is turn caused the sunnis to desperately support Saddam, despite his crimes, because they knew that without him they would lose their privileged position and probably face reprisal from the shiites.

It's very similar to the position of the Serbs in Yugoslavia, the only difference is when the US invaded it refused to allow the country to be broken into multiple pieces. As much as I hate ISIS, I have to admit they do have a point when they say that the sunni parts of Iraq and Syria really should be one country.

>but thank christ the neocons are finally dead
that's what you think
politico.eu/article/i-think-there-is-a-fantastic-opportunity-here/

yeah but lets not forget we did accomplish what we set out to do
wonkette.com/227054/we-actually-won-the-iraq-war-hooray

He was an evil bastard, but Iraq was better off with him than without him.

Easy to remember: Shia are moderate Muslims and usually dictators who keep things in line,

Sunnis are terrorists and extremists and are the scourge of the earth.

At the very least the US should have set up a puppet government when they took out Saddam.

>Easy to remember: Shia are moderate Muslims and usually dictators who keep things in line, Sunnis are terrorists and extremists and are the scourge of the earth.

Top kek, it turns out Ayatollah Khomeini was a moderate Muslim who kept things in line, while Nursultan Nazarbayev is a terrorist and an extremist. I have heard many ridiculous things said about Islam on this board, but this one takes the cake.

Sure, but groups like ISIS and Al Queda are Sunni, while Iran is Shia. Shias tend to be more organized and have state-support, I didn't say they weren't barbaric.

>ally
That was before he invaded Kuwait.

He started a war that killed a million people and led to a collective $1.25 trillion economic loss (in 1985 dollars) for the two involved countries. That alone should be enough to classify him as one of the most incompetent and destructive dictators in the modern history of the Middle East.

Bush Sr. basically created the monster that was post-Gulf War Saddam.

The funny thing is, he could have ended the Gulf War with a decisive victory, but rather than go in for the final blow at the end of the war he.... backed off?

GW Bush went to war on his fathers advice, to absolve him. Bush Sr. was under extreme scrutiny for the Gulf War, and many wanted to bring him down for it. Do not forget the immense power and influence Bush Sr wielded. Genuinely very intelligent man.

You're completely wrong.
Saddam represented a type of secular/nationalist authoritarian government.
The US TRIED to make a puppet shia government and the result is literally ISIS because the sunni majority didn't want to put up with that shit.

>GW Bush went to war on his fathers advice

Literally the opposite.

was legit insane and stupid unlike gaddafi ..
Guy was illiterate for most of his life and declared war on Iran and Kuwait just because he had an over blown ego. gassing the Kurds was the final straw for the west and had enough of his BS. They made up a load of BS about him having WMDs (I doubt he even knew what a nuke was) just to get ride of him. the only good part was he was secular but thats not saying much

t*rk

How am I "completely wrong"? I'll admit I didn't have all my facts straight, but Sunnis do tend to be the jihadists and Shias do tend to be the dictators in the M.E.

The US should have found another moderate Sunni dictator. Why was that so hard to do?

Because it would destroy the justification for the war.

Shiites are jihadists, they're just usually doing it in the direct employ of a national government.

Also, Iraq is majority Shia, so a Shia strongman was inevitable.

Saddam was a man born in the wrong century. He'd be better off with the likes of Stalin, Tito, Hitler, Mussolini, Churchill and FDR. Not Bush Sr. Gorbachev and Thatcher.

>Saddam was a man born in the wrong century.
For the record I mean figuratively. He ruled in the wrong era. Obvious he was born in the same century as those guys.

I'm inclined to believe you but do you have some sources for that?

he's cool but his sons are psychopaths also whole mideast went to shit after Saddam sama

All what he did is obviously overblown, waaaaaaaaaay to much.

He was pretty harsh with his people but it was rough love. The only people who were rebellious in his country were shiite extremists, not your average Shia joe. He had Shi'ite cabinet members and generals and officials, I can post a webm of a unit of shiites in the iraqi army parading infront of Saddam.

The west demonized the shit out of him after he stopped being useful though, and don't talk to me about Kurds. They're a parasite in the middle east and were a thorn in Iraq's side for decades employing pussy tactics of hitting weak areas, border guards, ambushing cars driving in rural highways (civilian or military alike) than hiding among civilians. Hitting Halabja was fucking necessary.

this is a retarded way to interpret the course of events.

Iranians infiltrated the shit out of the new string-controlled Iraqi government, USA's puppet oil state plan backfired and they had to prop up ISIS and other terrorists to prevent it from going over to Iran, clients in the gulf helped.

We sold him chemical weapons (historical fact).
He used these chemical weapons (historical fact).
Then somehow there were no WMDs in Iraq, because some news anchors said so. The majority of Americans, and Westerners around the world, believe this misconception. Really makes you think...

He was a bastard and he deserved to hang.

Yeah because America is the only country in the world which is allowed to have WMD's am I right?

>Iraq's military arsenal included weapons of mass destruction (biological and chemical) starting from 1960s, effectively ending with its near total destruction in the 1990s. Iraq used chemical weapons on multiple occasions, both domestically and in the war against Iran. After the first Gulf War in 1991, the UN Security Council required Iraq to eliminate its chemical, biological and previously unknown nuclear weapon programs under UN verification. Iraq was subsequently accused of having restarted its WMD programs, which was the principal justification for the 2003 invasion of Iraq by the United States and a number of its allies.

Also

America sold those chemical weapons
American contractors helped the Iraqis deploy those weapons
American intelligence pointed the Iraqis even where to throw those weapons

The Americans didn't give three shits if Saddam bombed fifty million people with chemicals as long as he was useful you stupid ape, the moment he stopped being useful since Iran went full Islam instead of commie (the main reason the USA suggested to saddam to invade them and supported him) they immediately called him out for using chemicals at that point.

Why are burgers so retarded and naive?

>Iran turns full jihad
> to Shore up borders build quasi alliance with US
>US funds you and your enemy for costly nearly decade long war
>Ask US if it's cool to invade Kuwait
>Incompetent ambassador says it's cool
>get immediately BTFO, America tries to cause uprising in the populous south.
>10 years later incompetent Texan needs to spread freedom and democracy
>get hanged
He wasn't exactly great, but he still used to be in our sphere. Still betrayed the fuck out of him though

>but Sunnis do tend to be the jihadists and Shias do tend to be the dictators in the M.E.

You can find only one example of a situation in which the dictator is Shia and the jihadists are Sunnis in the entire history of the Middle East: the Syrian Civil War, and in this case the Shia dictators is being helped by Shia jihadists. You clearly don't know what you are talking about.

>The US should have found another moderate Sunni dictator. Why was that so hard to do?

All of the 3 Presidents Iraq has had since Saddam Hussein was toppled were Sunnis, although I doubt any of them can be called dictators.

*the Shia dictator

Also
>america get's rid of former military
>don't give them jobs or have them meaningfully invested in the new dysfunctional secretarian government
>gets suprised and completely off guard when former military commanders defect to hardline sunni rebel movement.
American foreign policy is a fucking joke

>incomptent ambassador

are you actually fucking retarded?

>fund Iraq

You think America gave all that money and support to Iraq for fucking charity? not anything related to USSR taking hold of power vacuum?

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/April_Glaspie

I'd say she's pretty fucking incompetent.

And the money was more related to hedging in revolutionary Iran than cold war era geopolitics

>being this retardedly naive

my post has more brain cells than you do.

>ad hominem
It's okay, we know your incompetent too

How can I be respectful to people with normie/mainstream tiers of history/political understanding? you're not even worthy of respect, you're a retarded news-channel/article bot with a very very small picture on things and probably believe in political "justice" and that America invades/condemns based on "good and bad". You're as retarded as it gets.

He wanted to be paid in gold for his oil instead of green paper, then his country got democracy.

Makes you think, does it not?

>If I call them parasites then it justifies the mass murder of civilians, including women and children.

>attack enemy country
>attack both military and civilian targets while enemy country is occupied with massive war with other country
>enemy country decides its had enough of your shit 20 years later and gives you the iron hot treatment

They had what it's coming for them. I don't justify the casualties in civilians, but when you're so much of a pussy that you attack civilians and hide among civilians you deserve what comes to you and you're an idiot if you let the enemy get away scott free forever if they use tactics like that.

How the fuck did we have a "privileged position", Tito was a Croat and we lost Kosovo to hordes of fucking Shipqitar muslim trash.

Assad isn't Shia, he's an Alawite. Shia do support the regime though, because the alternative is being exterminated by ISIS and "moderate" rebels.