[sam h]

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It should in fact be clear that the Iraqi people can do no worse than if Saddam had been left in. The torture and use of chemical weapons on his own people showed that.

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I won't defend Saddam. But his enormous crimes against his people peaked in the 1980s and tapered off drastically afterwards. The recent revelations about the Badr militia indicate that its entirely within the realm of possibility for a regime to emerge that would approximate the level of human rights abuse in Iraq circa 2001.

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And our security interests cannnot be served by allowing such regimes to exist when they have shown a willingness to develop WMDs whether we found any or not, and which also had previously caused us to have to honor defense committments to a neighboring country of theirs at great cost.

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That is the Bush administration line. The other interpretation, forwarded by most Iraqi and Middle East experts, is that Saddam lost his appetite for foreign aggression after the Gulf War, was a die-hard secularist at heart who hated the Wahabbis, and was having substantial trouble maintaining internal order, all adding up to him being content to rule his little fiefdom and not attempting to restart the weapons program in earnest or posing a stubstantial external security threat anymore.

Would you rather have Saddam puttering around in his little fiefdom or have part of that fiefdom turn into a stateless and uncontrollable breeding/training ground for Al-Qaeda? Because that almost describes the present, and is a very realistic future, for the Sunni provinces in a divided Iraq.