4 ms·

Once a state-sponsor of terrorism, always a state-sponsor of terrorism. He simply could not be trusted. Just because he allegedly stopped sponsoring terrorism

Once a state-sponsor of terrorism, always a state-sponsor of terrorism. He simply could not be trusted. Just because he allegedly stopped sponsoring terrorism and aligned himself against al-Qaeda doesn't mean he wouldn't ever cause trouble in the future. Vladimir Putin is also against ISIS. How much do you trust him?

acqq 11y ago
So al-Qaeda and ISIS are less evil? And the 1988 attack is more worrying than the 2001 one and everything that happened since? I don't understand your reasoning, especially looking at it as an European. (The only "annoying" thing Europe remembers Gaddafi for, from the times before the war, is his son getting drunk somewhere in Switzerland or something like that.)
- rm_-rf_slash 11y ago
  There is no either-or. There are no sides, only players. I doubt you predicted ISIS in 2011, and neither did the State Department. They saw an opportunity to knock out an old adversary with a lot of oil money that they couldn't trust and it didn't quite work out the way they hoped. Who's to say that if he stayed in power he wouldn't swing back towards terrorism if it proved advantageous? An autocrat will do what they must to stay in power, and if it meant placating the terrorist groups, he may have very well done that. It doesn't make him any more or less evil than any killer of innocents.
  - CWuestefeld 11y ago
    I doubt you predicted ISIS in 2011, and neither did the State Department. I did, and I'm no foreign policy expert. Plenty of pundits did the same. "Nature abhors a vacuum" applies just as much to politics as it does to physics, and it was pretty obvious that by removing the stabilizing force we were throwing the dice, making a hail-mary bet that whatever sprouted up in the rubble wouldn't be any worse. Anybody who wasn't thinking that far ahead shouldn't be making these kinds of decisions. EDIT: at the time I argued about it back then, my primary point was that our attacks were clearly illegal, the president usurping Congressional authority. The outcome really underscores the reason that we have these checks and balances. If we'd had some real deliberation, rather than one "Nobel Peace Prize" winner with any itchy trigger finger, much of this might have been avoided.
  - dragonwriter 11y ago
    > I doubt you predicted ISIS in 2011 Plenty of people were predicting that an invasion of Iraq would lead to an explosion of radical, anti-Western, violent totalitarian Islam in that area as far back as discussion of the Iraq invasion which occurred in 2003 occurred, and predicting that the Iraqi Sunni population would be its breeding ground and Islamist groups kept it check by Hussein's regime would be its nucleus. No one predicted that the exact group (which already existed) which became "al-Qaeda in Iraq" when it decided to affiliate with al-Qaeda for its anti-US brand currency during the occupation (and later became the "Islamic State in Iraq" after it decided that al-Qaeda's constraints were holding it back rather than the brand being useful, then "the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant" when the splinter group it sent to fight in the Syrian Civil War merged back, and later just "the Islamic State" when it decided geographic constraints in its name were overly constraining) was going to be the particular one that would become the big concern, but the basic outline was predicted well in advance.

acqq 11y ago

So al-Qaeda and ISIS are less evil? And the 1988 attack is more worrying than the 2001 one and everything that happened since? I don't understand your reasoning, especially looking at it as an European. (The only "annoying" thing Europe remembers Gaddafi for, from the times before the war, is his son getting drunk somewhere in Switzerland or something like that.)

rm_-rf_slash 11y ago
There is no either-or. There are no sides, only players. I doubt you predicted ISIS in 2011, and neither did the State Department. They saw an opportunity to knock out an old adversary with a lot of oil money that they couldn't trust and it didn't quite work out the way they hoped. Who's to say that if he stayed in power he wouldn't swing back towards terrorism if it proved advantageous? An autocrat will do what they must to stay in power, and if it meant placating the terrorist groups, he may have very well done that. It doesn't make him any more or less evil than any killer of innocents.
- CWuestefeld 11y ago
  I doubt you predicted ISIS in 2011, and neither did the State Department. I did, and I'm no foreign policy expert. Plenty of pundits did the same. "Nature abhors a vacuum" applies just as much to politics as it does to physics, and it was pretty obvious that by removing the stabilizing force we were throwing the dice, making a hail-mary bet that whatever sprouted up in the rubble wouldn't be any worse. Anybody who wasn't thinking that far ahead shouldn't be making these kinds of decisions. EDIT: at the time I argued about it back then, my primary point was that our attacks were clearly illegal, the president usurping Congressional authority. The outcome really underscores the reason that we have these checks and balances. If we'd had some real deliberation, rather than one "Nobel Peace Prize" winner with any itchy trigger finger, much of this might have been avoided.
- dragonwriter 11y ago
  > I doubt you predicted ISIS in 2011 Plenty of people were predicting that an invasion of Iraq would lead to an explosion of radical, anti-Western, violent totalitarian Islam in that area as far back as discussion of the Iraq invasion which occurred in 2003 occurred, and predicting that the Iraqi Sunni population would be its breeding ground and Islamist groups kept it check by Hussein's regime would be its nucleus. No one predicted that the exact group (which already existed) which became "al-Qaeda in Iraq" when it decided to affiliate with al-Qaeda for its anti-US brand currency during the occupation (and later became the "Islamic State in Iraq" after it decided that al-Qaeda's constraints were holding it back rather than the brand being useful, then "the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant" when the splinter group it sent to fight in the Syrian Civil War merged back, and later just "the Islamic State" when it decided geographic constraints in its name were overly constraining) was going to be the particular one that would become the big concern, but the basic outline was predicted well in advance.