Breaking: Boots to be put on the ground in Iraq (AP)

[Indy Texas 🇺🇦🇵🇸]

This is the wrong decision.  We have wasted too much blood and treasure there.  Just let the country fall.  Nothing we can do here.

They need to ensure all US civilian personnel in Baghdad can leave the country safely. Then we pull the ladder up with us, turn the lights off, lock the door and let what happens happen.

Are there any Americans still delusional enough to believe this is preferable to if we had just left Saddam in power?

[Indy Texas 🇺🇦🇵🇸]

We need a Saddam Hussein Blingee to complement the Milosevic one for every smug apologist for tyrants who revel in any level of violence and carnage provided they can use it to prove a fuzzy political point. There's a disturbing trend where people fetishise murderous dictators based on some hyper-bourgeois notion of "stability".

Saddam Hussein killed a bunch of Iraqis. Now Islamist terrorists are killing a bunch of Iraqis.

We spent billions of dollars to remove Saddam Hussein from power so that Iraqis could be tortured and killed by someone other than Saddam Hussein.

We weren't "welcomed as liberators." There is no latent liberal democratic tendency in the Iraqi people that just needed to be awakened by some 'Murican nation building. The only choices in the Middle East are who you'd rather be oppressed by.

Iraq under Saddam Hussein didn't have roadside bombs blowing up indiscriminately. It didn't have radical mullahs forcing women into hijab. The lights were on and the water was running. If you pissed off Saddam, you got tortured and killed.

This is the alternative: bombs blowing up indiscriminately, Sharia law, and a total breakdown in public services. And if you piss off Maliki/ISIS/etc, you get tortured and killed by Maliki/ISIS/etc.

If you seriously think the latter is somehow preferable to the former and that we were right to spend our own blood and treasure to bring that about, then you are, with all due respect, an idiot and a naif.

[Indy Texas 🇺🇦🇵🇸]

It would also likely have contained Iran a bit more. Now they have free reign in the region.

Saddam was completely impotent after the late '90s. He had no wherewithal to deal with Iran, but at least he wouldn't have turned Iraq into an Iranian client state, which is basically what Maliki has done.

From a strategic standpoint, you could argue it's preferable for ISIS to cripple the Iraqi government because it will create a chink in the uninterrupted sphere of influence Iran has stretching from Lebanon on the Mediterranean to its own eastern border with Afghanistan.