Quote:
Originally posted by Azred:
I agree with Mr. Harris. You will never stop a person--or a nation--from committing acts of brutality by talking with them, no matter how good your intentions might be.
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Exactly correct. Brutal dictators like Saddam almost never walk away. Almost always they have to be removed by the use of violence at some level. Thus, there tend to be only four options:
1. Assassination
2. Internal Coup
3. (Internal) Civil War
4. (External) War
Arguably, assassination was always an option. But from what I've heard, Saddam was rarely seen in public.
It sounded to me as if Saddam and his 2 sons had a pretty firm grip on power and an internal coup didn't sound likely. Can't say that I've every heard of any failed coup attempts against Saddam in the last 12 years.
Same thing goes for civil war. Saddam had a pretty firm boot on the proverbial throat of the Iraqi people and between his secret police and his military, a civil war seemed quite unlikely to even get started.
It seems like this left only option #4 for removing Saddam from the scene.
The statement that violence never solves anything is nothing but naive foolishness. The American Revolution, the American Civil War, and WW2 are all examples where violence resolved a "problem". The more accurate statement should be that violence least prefered method of solving problems, the solution of last resort, the solution used when the apparant cost of doing nothing is greater than the certain cost of resorting to violence.