Quote:
|
Originally Posted by dude1394
...Iraq taking kuwait is a fine example. So we let it go, then saddam takes saudia arabia.
Is it okay? You have to answer the question. Is it okay to have one madman own most of the oil reserves in the world?
|
this is a pretty interesting question........alex's really brief history of this whole thing:
1. Ronnie Reagan and his gang supports saddam for quite a while. Yeah, sure, Saddam was a sadistic socialist nut, but he wasn't a crazy shiite like the iranians nor was he a freak job wahibist like the saudi rabble. He did keep Iran tied down through the 80's and hence neither iraq nor iran were a threat to our little gas tank in the gulf (aka, the House of Saud).
2. In the real late 80's, Saddam gets all pissed at the Kuwaitis because the Arabs down in Kuwait didn't pay him for keeping the crazy Persians out of Kuwait. So Saddam acts like a typical crazy arab and goes in and takes their stuff. After he takes a little he decides he wants the whole damn thing.
3. Saddam's foray into Kuwait really pissed George Bush off. Plus Bush was really bored at the time and a Gulf War gave him something fun to do. So Bush goes to a Saudi Prince and says, "No problem, Abdul, we got it covered.
4. As much as Saddam's little property anexation pissed bush off, it made somebody else even madder -- Osama Bin Laden. Bin Laden really hated Saddam because Saddam was a commie, and those wahibis from the peninsula had just spent a decade fighting the commies in Afghanistan (quite successfully, I might add)....
5. So Osama goes to one of the Saudi Princes and says, "look, me and my boys just returned from taking out the Allah-less Soviet Union, surely we can handle this dipstick Saddam. Allah is on our side." The Saudi Prince says, "Thanks but no thanks. I've got the US -- check it out, they've parked half a million Christians right over there by Mecca. Neat, huh?"
6. This really pisses Osama off. Osama figures the House of Saud are a bunch of apostates, and that they maintain their rule because the US provides muscle to prop 'em up. So Osama gets to thinking, "how do we get these apostates out and get a real ummah goin' on??? We knock out their muscle!" Then Osama says, "go jihad all over the US."
7. Next thing you know, a bunch of really pissed off Saudis are flying airplanes into buildings in the US.....
......so.........maybe the benefit of keeping Saddam out of Kuwait was worth the blow-back. I dunno.
It seems plausible to me, regardless, that had we not intervened, Saddam and Osama could have duked it out for a few years, and I imagine it would have been pleasantly brutal war in which large swathes of both camps were killed.
EDIT: Onceupon a time I addressed this very question elsewhere in a much less smart-ass tone -->
Link.