Was Getting Rid of Saddam Worth It?

I often hear from people who suggest that, in spite of the great costs involved in our invasion of Iraq, it was all worth it because ridding Iraq of Saddam Hussein, a mass murderer, was a good thing to do.

I could not disagree more with this position. First of all, even if the premise is true (that it was good for Iraq), we must consider the cost to America of this action in relation to alternatives with the same or smaller costs. For example, we could have spared many thousands of American lives and saved TRILLIONS of present and future dollars by developing fusion power.

But even that premise was wrong. Saddam was indeed a mass murderer, but he was also an enemy of the same terrorists that we are at war with. Even for the Iraqi people, he was a better alternative than the bloodbath which is ongoing and which he prevented for decades with his tyrannical system.

We should have made plans in the 1990s for responding to terrorist attacks with massive bombing of their camps in Afghanistan. But, in fact, our military was never asked to develop such plans, because the media and some liberal organizations have trained us to worry about collateral damage. But carpet bombing of terrorist camps in Afghanistan in the 1990s would have spared us of 9/11 and given us the upper hand in the war with Islamic terrorism.

The lesson is clear. We are not the Policeman of the world. We need to put American interests first, and crush any organization which is at war with us, wherever they are. Instead of worrying about collateral damage, we should be worrying about the security of our children.