Yippee! Dead men don't escape from prison or exile (see Napoleon).

To the victor go the spoils (or the power to hang the opposing leader). Nothing happened to LBJ for escalating the Vietnam War, though, and lotsa people died over there for oil, too.

Good post Frank.

I can't believe that Americans would compare people like Cheney, Runsfeld, Bush and others to Hussein, Hitler and other mass genocide maniacs.  There's a huge difference that anyone should be able to see.  They may not run the war to suit some, they may have entered a war some don't agree with, but they did NOT go aound killing off Americans who disagreed with them.  They didn't wipe out an entire American family just because they were against one person.  They did not, as Hussein did, surround themselves with family to run the government because they couldn't trust anyone else.  They did not put their sons in power and allow them to rape and murder people just because the felt like it.

The analogy of the speeding car is hardly a rational comparison to the raping and murdering of your own countrymen.

Our political leaders may not run the government to suit you but to compare them to the monsters in history is disgusting.

   Comments like that make you the best man on our enemies team

- frankc29 on Dec 29, 2006 at 11:07 PM wrote:

>>>What new government of any sort would NOT make laws against mass murder?

--->My post wasn't about whether or not a new government could/would make laws against murder.  My post was about whether or not you should be tried for violating laws that did not exist when you committed the actions that you are on trial for.

- NancyII on Dec 30, 2006 at 06:35 AM wrote:

>>>The analogy of the speeding car is hardly a rational comparison to the raping and murdering of your own countrymen.

--->Nancy you have an amazing talent for focusing on and comparing the details of an analogy rather than the point of it.

Obviously, speeding is not on par with murder.  Speeding wasn't point.  Murder wasn't either The purpose of an analogy is to over simplify a problem and place the problem is a different, usually more common situation so that the point of the argument can be more easily understood.

I love discussing things with you, but in order to have a dialogue, we must both be intellectually honest in doing so.  I believe you are an educated person and I find it very hard to believe you didn't understand the point of my analogy, but I also don't believe you are just trying to stir things up, so I'm lost as to where the breakdown in communication happened.

>>>Our political leaders may not run the government to suit you but to compare them to the monsters in history is disgusting.

--->You must be referring to someone else's comments, I don't believe I did that.

- cheeksmck on Dec 30, 2006 at 07:48 AM wrote:

>>>You seem to absolutley despise your own goverment.

--->Indeed I do.  I'm suprised that you don't.  Yes, I admit it, I despise Bob Barr, Tom Delay, John Kerry, Ted Kennedy, Karl Rove, John Boehner, David Drier, John Conyers, Darrell Issa, Cynthia McKinney, Charles Rangel, Dana Rohrabacher, George Allen, Evan Bayh, Hillary clinton, John Cornyn, Bill Frist, Rick Santorum, and many more.  They are idiots and assholes who exist in our government for their own personal gain.  They do little or nothing to benefit their constituants or their country.  I have absolutely no use for them.

>>>you can say all theses things and still live with no fear of men coming to your door and killing your family in front of you. And then you being tortured and executed yourself . No instead you get to start a blog .

--->I've spent my entire adult life in the US military, and have served in the middle east, including operation Enduring Freedom, so please don't lecture me about my privelages in the living in the US.  I do know something about that.

- mattloch on Dec 30, 2006 at 09:27 AM wrote:

>>>Can we finally declare "Mission Accomplished" now and get the hell out?

--->I sure wish we would!

Ummm...John, Napoleon actually did escape his first exile.

I'm with you Mattloch.

Last night MSNB ran a piece on Saddam and discussed his "Hitlerist and Stalinist" roots. No doubt he was a bad man; maybe this will make our troops more optimistic about their plight.

- frankc29 on Dec 30, 2006 at 03:32 PM wrote:

>>> By this reasoning any madman dictator can partake in any inhumanity he pleases against his citenry, since he is above the law...in effect he is the law. You cannot later try him and punish him because he did not already have laws on the books to punish himself That about cover it Goat?

---->Well, yes and no.  Since we are not the worlds police, or, at least we shouldn't be, we shouldn't be going around the world putting people on trial for what we perceive are crimes against humanity.   But, since we can't seem to mind our own business, there is an international tribunal in the hague that can be used for such things, intead of creating a sham court to try him for violating laws that never existed, and destroying our credibility while twisting the idea of democracy into a corruption on par with that of the dictator we so valiantly removed from office and hanged.

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I'm not upset we killed him, I'm just upset we went to such great lengths to prove how morally superior we are to everyone else, when in the end, it was all just a big, expensive, farce.  There was no other way that trial could have turned out.  We should have just killed him in that hole we found him in.  We would have saved our credibility and a whole lot of fuss.

The question that needs to be asked is, was it worth 3,000 dead American troops and a half trillion dollars?

No.

Dead is dead no matter how its distributed. he deserved it, he was tried in his country by the people he committed the crimes against. all this other arguing is pointless and disrespectful to the memory of those he slaughtered. He was just another terrorist in a uniform. The only comment that stood out in this whole blog was the death of our soldiers and the money spent to get this far.

This all started because of 911, a tragic loss of American lives. Sure he had been screwing with us for years prior.. but you have to admit that was the driving force to get things started in the right direction.

Too many of you that have probably never even been to war, are sitting around punching out your opinions and failing to remember the goals the Americans rightfully and whole heartedly set after that slaughter on our homeland..our homeland can you phathom that goat head??

Goodnight So Dam Insane you waste of human flesh!!!! I say its done..now where's bin laden?? NEXT!!! 

PS..yes Johnson should be held responsible for his part in Viet Nam and the Kennedy assassination. Its just too bad its taken so long for the American public to finally start admitting he was an evil man.

If you remember they said they knew what happened but wouldn't reveal it for 25 years after Kennedy's death because of the repercussions it would cause. They knew Johnson would be long gone and buried by then, and he wouldn't be forced to answer for his crimes. He has proven to be too much of an embarrassment to the American public and we allowed it too happen. Consequently he will never be charged for his crimes in the history books. 

His crimes were too horrid to admit..not like poor ol Nixon's 'Water Gate Scandal'..it doesn't even compare...he just got caught doing what all the others have done since we started voting for president.

It will just be swept under the carpet with the rest of the trash!

Sorry Goat but that's my opinion.  For an analogy to work it should compare apples to apples and not to oranges.  I do understand what you were getting at (see if I'm right or not) that you shouldn't go back and try someone retroactively once the ground rules have changed.  And yes, I was focusing on the details because whether the rules change or not, this man cause massive damage to a whole country and anyone who disagreed with him.  The scope of his crimes far exceeds your analogy.

I've been trying to think of an analogy that would fit Husseins situation and the only one I can think of would be could we try a cannibal for having his enemies over for dinner when it's wasn't against the law in his culture when it happened.  I believe this is one of those times when logic isn't used as much as emotion with people wanting something truly evil....gone.

I agree with you completely on the part about how we should have dropped a grenade in that hole but I don't think it would have mattered as to him ended up a martyr.  Whether he was imprisoned for life, killed in a spider hole, or hanged, his followers hatred of us would never have changed and the monster would have become a rallying point if not a martyr anyway.       JMHO ...

Thanks for the compliment about the intelligent part..some here would strongly disagree with you on that.  :-)

Nancy, I think I understand what you are trying to say, and I understand why you feel the scope of his crimes (I use that word very loosely, because his actions, horrible as they were, really weren't crimes) make you feel the way you do.

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My position is that in the scope of things, he and his crimes are insignificant compared to what we've done now.  In order to impose our form of government onto Iraq, we have told them that ours is superior to theirs because it follows the rule of law, and that's why they should abandon the way they've done things for thousands of years and do things our way.  With this farce we called a trial, we have proven to the Iraqis that we have absolutely no credibility (they already suspected that, we just confirmed it for them), and in the process we have completely undermined both democracy and the rule of law.

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If you remember correctly, the reason they said we had the trial in the first place instead of just killing him as we should have was to teach them about the rule of law and democracy, and then we go and waste the opportunity to show them how the law is really supposed to work by teaching them how to shop around for a "hanging juduge."

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When it comes down to it, we are just as barbaric and uncivilized as they are...  We just like our form of barbarism better than theirs.

Ethnocentrism.

But the fact is, although we may seem as barbaric as the Saddams of the world,  we don't slaughter people in our society just because they don't like us.  We don't publically behead and torture detractors.  We don't wipe out entire families because the are from another religious sect.  If we did, most people on this board wouldn't still be alive.

I don't see the trial as a farce.  I see it as something that needed to be done once Hussein was brought into custody.  There is hypocrisy in our government..there is hypocrisy right here in our town..and on this board.   I don't think we are disagreeing on any of that, or that the man needed to be hung, I think we just disagree on the way the powers that be went about it.

NancyII, you are absolutley right, ethnocentrism is ugly and unhealthy, and the United States has a real bad case of it.

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It seems to me that you either don't understand and undervalue the role that the "rule of law" played, or should have played in this situation.  I refuse to believe that you don't understand it.

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It's like being invited to a friends church.  Your friend suggests you'd like attending their church better than attending your own.  They suggest their church follows the bible "more closely" than yours does.  Well there has been some problems at your church lately, so out of curiousity, you agree to go.  At first, this church seems really wonderful, everyone seems really welcoming and really friendly, eaget to give you the shirt off of their back if needed.  Athough they claim to follow a strict interpretation of the bible, you soon discover (through watching them) that is just lip service.  They actually do whatever serves them, regardless of what the bible says, and they only really use the bible when it justifies what they have decided they want to do.  You would quickly start to question how much you value what they have to offer you, and maybe even question your friends honesty and what kind of friend they are.  If the church continued to hound you and suggest their brand of christianity is supierior to yours. or better for you than yours, you would eventually grow openly hostile toward them and would want nothing else to do with them.

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That is precisely what we have done in Iraq.  Just replace the bible with the law and that's exactly what we have done.  We have told them how important to law is to us, and how following the rule of law will make them a better, more moral, more just society, and then we prove just how little the rule of law actually means to us.

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It's disgusting what our leaders have done over there in our name, with our resources, while squandering the lives of our sons and daughters.

For me, the more closely a church "follows the Bible" the less likely I'd be to attend.

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Regarding the blog topic, we've now squandered the last chance we had in Iraq to set a good example, by handing Saddam over to his Shiite executors.  We can start leaving now (as Sen. Joe Lieberman CT-DFL) suggested about six months back.  There's nothing positive to be achieved now.  And the death toll is 3000, exactly, at year's end.

I'm satisfied with the hanging!   Scum like Sadam Hussein counted on people being too civilized to take the rational route of eradicating him and the monsters like him.  At least some good will come out of our invasion of Iraq.

Maybe other world dictators will look over their shoulders a bit before they commence  genocide on their countrymen.  Are you watching North Korea?

Reminds me of those old Chinese Kung-Fu movies:

Bush "Saddam, you have attacked and dishonored my family, and now you shall DIE!"