French foreign minister Dominique de Villepin is either stupid or a liar. Or both, I guess.
The world is a more dangerous place because of the U.S.-led war in Iraq, which may have toppled Saddam Hussein but also unleashed postwar violence and an upswing in terrorism, the French foreign minister said.Fewer people are dying in post-war violence in Iraq than were killed, raped, and tortured under Saddam's regime. That's a fact, and all the numbers support it. This doesn't even count the lives that improving medical care, access to clean water, and electricity are saving.
"We have to look reality in the face: we have entered into a more dangerous and unstable world, which requires the mobilization of the entire international community," de Villepin said.More dangerous for whom? Iraqis? Terrorists? Cowards who were making hundreds of billions of dollars from selling Saddam weapons and buying Iraqi oil?Assertions by the administration of President Bush that ousting Saddam would make the world a safer place proved not to be true, de Villepin said.
"Terrorism didn't exist in Iraq before," de Villepin said. "Today, it is one of the world's principal sources of world terrorism."Really? Saddam wasn't a "terrorist" because he sent a representative to the UN and lined the pockets of French officials with oil contracts -- but he's responsible for many more deaths than Osama Bin Laden.
And now Iraq is a principle source of world terrorism? Funny, I haven't read any stories about Iraqi terrorists blowing up Spanish trains or French oil tankers. Huh.
If only we could return to the golden age of UN-sponsored graft and corruption! Sure, lots of poor, brown people got butchered, but that's really an internal problem. As long as the oil kept pouring out and the weapons kept pouring in we should have just minded our own business.
Update:
Jay Redding has some examples of pre-liberation non-Saddam terrorism in Iraq (via Slings-n-Arrows).
*sigh*
How do guys like Villepin sleep at night?
I mean, when your entire job is to be full of it . . . how do you sleep?
I'm leaning toward him being stupid.
I shudder to think that anybody could consciously LIE so openly. I wonder at what passes for education among that bunch.
Honestly, we should have stayed home in WW I and let the Kaiser have the place. We'd have missed Adolf Hitler AND Charles De Gaulle...
This guy is a straight up liar. Beyond illegal oil contracts and the generally awful policies of supporting Saddam Hussein's regime, de Villepin's France offers no hope to any greater cause of democracy or international freedom. They have a fairly strong record of supporting dictators and absolutists across the board. Best way to deal with the liberation of Iraq is to just lie about the effects - he's got plenty of audience in Europe and even here in America who gobble it up without looking at any facts.
...Although on second thought it wasn't too bright to screw over Powell like he did at the U.N. either....
Stupid OR a liar? Why not both?
FWP: Well, his lies are pretty stupid....
The idea that we are saving lives has already been refuted. Quite frankly, if we were going to attack for the purposes of saving lives, we should have done so in 1988 when Saddam was gassing the Kurds, not now that Saddam has been relatively benign.
In terms of infrastructure, much of what America is rebuilding is stuff that we destroyed in the first place. Terrorists are operating in Iraq and fighting against the local population as well as coalition forces, which wasn't happening before. Al Qaeda has also seen an upsurge in recruitment which isn't good either.
Also, all governments and government agencies are corrupt to certain degrees. Be it the Iraqi government, US government, UN, Indian government, whomever, they are all corrupt in one way or another. Of course, there are degrees of corruption and the US government isn't as corrupt as the Indian government or the UN (as an example). Having said all that, I would presume that an Iraqi government would be more like India and the UN than the United States in terms of corruption. Corruption isn't going away by just getting the UN or Saddam out of the picture.
Manish: Refuted? By who? All the stats I've seen say the opposite, and the Iraqi "street" agrees. As for Saddam's benignity... gee... do you think that has anything to do with the no-fly zones? Naahhhhh.
As for infrastructure, they've got more electricity than they did before the war, more oil production, more healthcare, better roads, and so forth. Saddam completely neglected the country's infrastructure and used the oil money to build palaces and pay off the power brokers he needed to stay in power.
Corruption is a big issue, you're definitely right. It will probably take a generation or two before the problem can be soved, best-case. It's cultural.
I don't think the War on Terror has made us safer, but the point is that eventually it will make us safer. And not fighting that war would eventially make us far less safe. That is the reason that, apart from my opposition to invading Iraq as an expensive and counterproductive detour, I have been supportive of Bush's efforts.
Michael..first off, Human Rights Watch notes that the war was not justified on human rights grounds (I meant to link in my original comment..sorry about that). In terms of rough numbers, Barry says Saddam killed 300,000 people in 30 years of rule for an average of 10,000 per year. Iraq Body Count notes that there are currently between 8769-10618 civilian deaths in Iraq since the beginning of the war. When you consider that most of the deaths that occured in Iraq was in the 1980s between the Iran-Iraq war and the gassing of the Kurds, you can surmise that in recent years the number of deaths has been less than 10,000. Also, Iraq Body Count doesn't include soldiers killed both on our side and the Iraqi Army, many of whom were conscripts and probably didn't want to fight for Saddam either.
As to the "Iraqi street", I've seen evidence both ways...they didn't like Saddam, but they don't like the Americans either. They are hopeful for the future and lets pray that they do see a better future. Again, with the oil for palaces bit, I don't see corruption going down substantially with a democratic government.
I didn't have a huge problem with the no-fly zones. I think that they went a bit too far and we used them for too long, but other than that they were effective.
Oh my god, you actually use that "Iraq Body Count" fraud website as a source? Talk to the hand.
Great come back..when you can't refute the argument, just attack the sources.
Great comeback Andrea..when you can't refute the argument, just attack the sources used.
Mannish: The IBC website has been debunked so many times that it's not really worth doing so again. But hey, I like you, so here's a link.
JT: I agree with you, it will make us safer in the long run, but not every moment from now to then will be safer than it would have been otherwise.
Well, Villepin was right, turn your tv on!!!!