Thursday, Feb. 1, 2007 | 7:08 a.m.
Say what you will about the brutal dictator Saddam Hussein, but he knew how to keep his country in line. There were no terrorists, no insurgency and no civil war. He would never have tolerated it.
And we knew how to keep Saddam in line. There were sanctions, no-fly zones and U.N. inspectors making sure Saddam had no active WMD programs. We had him contained and controlled.
But President Bush was determined to replace a relatively stable situation with an unforgiveable one: an unnecessary war using troops as guinea pigs in a risky experiment testing whether Iraqis would relinquish their centuries-old longing for revenge and opt for reconciliation instead.
Partial results of the experiment are in. Hundreds of thousands have been killed, hundreds of billions of dollars wasted and tens of thousands of people have become amputees, seriously wounded and mentally ill. These numbers are especially egregious because no American, not one, should have been in Iraq fighting a war of choice completely unrelated to both 9/11 and the real problem of global terror.
Bush insists that no matter how long it takes or what it costs, this war is definitely "worth it." He refuses to acknowledge it has made America less safe, has empowered Iran, has inflamed the Middle East, has made the world resent and distrust us and has given a bad name to American-style democracy.
Starting this war was the worst foreign policy decision made by any president in American history and could not possibly be less "worth it."
Joyce Segal, Las Vegas
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