Reply #16: No, back in the days when Rummy had his picture taken [View All]

[Lydia Leftcoast]

with Saddam Hussein, many of us were upset that the Reagan admin was siding with such a thug, simply because Iran was on the other side.

Sad to say, Saddam Hussein was hardly the only dictator in the world, and not even one of the worst in my lifetime.

Although Saddam Hussein was extremely brutal to his opponents and some ethnic and religious groups, he appears to have been one of those dictators (unlike the North Koreans, say) who allowed normal life to continue for the majority of non-politicized people. In fact, his secularism meant that Iraqi women had more rights than in most Arab countries and that the educational system was at a higher level.

This is far from being a Saddam apologist. It's just pointing out that on a dictatorship scale, where 10 would be Pol Pot, Saddam was probably about a 6.