Death of Michael Ledeen, maker of the phony case for the invasion of Iraq

> $2 trillion for that war. Next time let’s cure cancer(s).

Aren't there any positive tradeoffs in overthrowing the likes of Saddam Hussein?

There's a problem there. Many people reason about things by assuming that since option A is clearly bad, option B must be more desirable. But in life we often have this fun situation where we get to choose between a bad choice, and a terrible one - there is no good one.

Saddam was, without any doubt, an at-times brutal tyrant. Yet not only was Iraq vastly more stable and peaceful under his reign, but so too was the entire Mideast. That war set off a chain reaction of events that led to a complete destabilization in the Mideast and created a fertile ground for extremist groups to recruit, operate, and generally thrive.

So I don't think so. Like in most contemporary wars, the only real winners are the arms dealers, and the people getting rich off death and destruction.

The problem was that he was holding Iraq together. After he fell, we ended up with a situation where there are about 1/2 as many Iraqi Christians in Sweden as there are in Iraq.

Basically, Iraq went straight to hell, and whatever minorities etc. didn't flee got murdered.

I interpret it as something along the lines of Saddam Hussein's government caring about having a strong or at least functional country enough that they only wanted to kill Kurds and Iranians.

Baathists are better than sectarian madmen, and I suspect we'll see some kind of idiot outcome in Syria as well.

Yeah, like killing half a million people, creating an environment for ISIS to germinate, grow, and perform unspeakable atrocities in both that, and a neighbouring country (with a little bit of fun terrorism in Europe thrown in, but on the grand scheme of things, the moral weight of a few hundred murdered Europeans pales in comparison to what they were doing closer to home).

It's never a bad idea to create a power vacuum by overthrowing a dictatorship and then utterly fucking up your occupation and handling of the peace.

It's not clear if any invader and occupier could have handled that part well, but it is absolutely clear that the ghouls running the Bush regime were completely incapable of it. That those architects are still part of civilized society, and didn't spend the rest of their worthless lives breaking rocks with their teeth in a chain gang never fails to boil my blood. They put the lie to every principle of freedom and liberty that western democracies claim to stand for.

Similar horrors were inflicted on Libya by the Obama administration in particular and NATO in the general, but they were smart enough to not even sully their hands with making any effort to occupy and nationbuild after the fact. And guess what happened? Also ISIS and also a decade of civil war, and while it's died down a bit, there are still violent clashes between warlords and a humanitarian disaster nobody gives two shits about going on in the background.

Under Qadaffi, Libyans weren't free. But they weren't hungry, either.

In an alternate timeline, maybe he would have become more of a dangerous liability, but I think it would have been cheaper for the CIA to overthrow him in any case

> Saddam was, without any doubt, an at-times brutal tyrant. Yet not only was Iraq vastly more stable and peaceful under his reign, but so too was the entire Mideast.

Hindsight is 20/20, but as consequences go I think that making a mockery of the UN in general and it's sanctions and weapons inspection in particular was something that had far more nefarious consequences. Most of today's stability issues in the middle east are caused by Iran financing and supporting terror groups, which isn't something that Saddam Hussein would counter. Worst case scenario, Saddam's post-normalization rule would double down on this playbook. Gaddafi's fate and Israel's handling of Iran shows that this blend of terrorism is only curtailed by going after the source.

The CIAs track record here is terrible. It basically only succeeds if there is already a viable opposition that it can hand bags of cash.

It can't create regime change out of nothing, despite what it's detractors and its own propaganda might claim.

Maybe? But it destabilized the Middle East, caused the migrant crisis in Europe, the migrant crisis caused a rise in right wing movements in Europe, it caused the rise of ISIS (lots of Iraqi ex-military), ISIS was involved in the the civil war in Syria, it caused a loss of faith in the American government, created a generation of disillusioned combat vets, so on and so forth.

I really think we're still recovering from the damage caused by Bush administration.

> The problem was that he was holding Iraq together.

Not really. He was oppressing Iraq and ruling it with a cruel tight grip, but any regime change takes decades to normalize. You don't just replace a nation's political class overnight and expect to a) not have pushback, b) the successors having it easy or hitting the ground running.

> as consequences go I think that making a mockery of the UN in general and it's sanctions and weapons inspection in particular was something that had far more nefarious consequences

Any serious observer could only agree. Colin Powell has much for which to answer, just for a start.

> any regime change takes decades to normalize

Oh come on. To whom in 2025 could you possibly expect to sell this nonsense excuse for an unbroken record of catastrophic neoconservative failure? Do you steal candy from babies also?

I think the outcome was bad enough that the cruel crip didn't matter, and I suspect that we'll find that to have been the case also in Syria.

Furthermore, it's not as if though cruel grips can't grow back with another hand.

Not much. Except for the oil companies. In any case the goal was not to make the world a better place.

Half a million dead for totally bogus reasons, and you want to try to find positive tradeoffs?

You’re saying that he was holding Iraq together in a bad way, which is true.

But he was holding it together. There might be a case for removing him, but note that nobody ever made that case without resting it on total fabrications. Because, while he was “bad” in a moral sense, there was no case for the war that could be made using the actual truth.

Are we recovering? The knock-on damage you list seems to be accelerating if anything.

Fair enough!