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What you're describing however is an absolute hell-hole of a country, the type of place that would've driven its citizens into continual acts of retaliatory violence against its rulers. Saddam would never have lived as long as he did.

This is one of the most inane things you've ever written.* Why, if a dictator is rotten enough, the people will just boot him right out of there! Therefore, Saddam's rule wasn't all that bad.

I could choke this board with references on what Saddam's rule was like. You have no idea what you're talking about.

For God's sake, do some reading, and learn how tyrannies maintain power over large numbers of people. Start with accounts of assassination attempts on Saddam, and the results. The same methods are being used right now by a small minority of insurgents and terrorists to suppress the rest of the Iraqis. How many murdered friends and relatives would it take for you to decide that opposition against a local gang is not a very good idea?

There was an elite in Saddam's Iraq that did quite well. Like plantation owners in the old South, whites in old South Africa, or the nomenklatura in the Soviet Union. There are always elites in tyrannies that do well.

Incidentally, we were in fact received well after the fall of Saddam, and even as recently as last September, over 60 percent of Iraqis polled still thought getting rid of Saddam was worth it.

* although I'm still recovering from Raoul's recommendation that we just let Middle Eastern countries vote in jihadists and then wait for peace to break out

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