lordjedi said:

zombie84 said:

Since Iraq and the middle east is in a worse state than when Saddam was around, no, we didn't really gain anything through his downfall.

I can't believe that some people can possibly defend the war in Iraq. Okay, maybe some people had different expectations when they first went in there, but after everything thats happened and come out, theres really nothing positive to say about it.

Nothing positive? How about real elections. How about people not being put into meat grinders. How about peaceful political dissension (read non-violent protests) actually being tolerated instead of the perpetrators being killed.

While that is nice, it comes served with a side dish of bloody civil war and massive destabilization in a region that was already a hell-hole, which has resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. Though granted new opporunities, Iraq is nonetheless far worse off than it was before the US invaded, it has unraveled into a complete mess that will not be able to be cleaned up in anyones lifetime, and the negative effects of the US invasion will continue to be felt long after the US pulls out there, whenever that will be. The American Revolution was a choice a nation made for itself, not one forced upon them by an outside occupier. If you are going to use the American Revolution as an analogy, then the US would be Britain and the Iraqi's would be the Colonials, since they are the indiginous peoples trying to throw off the impositions of a foreign power. I'm not saying that its terrible that theres some effort to build a democracy, because ideally that is a good thing, but the manner in which it was attempted was horribly misguided and did not have the best intentions of the Iraqi people behind it.