Also remember that the Republicans only care about a country’s sovereignty if they’re the ones who installed the government there. 

The real kicker is the Iraqis have a long enough attention span to know just who helped the Bath party come to power in Iraq. Levin’s speech should have went ‘We liberated them from our own brutal dictator whose party we helped to take power via the CIA and who we supported after our friend the Shah (who we subverted a democratic and popular uprising for in order to return him to the throne) lost control of his country because the US needs a strong man in the region.’ At best he could claim the the US government was trying to fix its own imperialist mistakes but he did not.

They interviewed a couple of former US army interrogators on the BBC last week.  It turns out the way the army finds insurgents is by arresting people who look Arabic.  In Iraq…

He said that it usually became obvious fairly quickly that the detainees were harmless civilians.  The problem was that many of these detainees had come from midnight raids on families.  Imagine how you would feel about the local law enforcement it they did that to you.

Yep, Saddam was a brutal dictator.  But look at it from an Iraqi’s point of view.  The Middle East and Asia is full of brutal dictators. He wasn’t hurting most of them, and unfortunately humans are particularly good at ignoring the plight of strangers if it puts them in danger- remember a lot of the genocide was happening against minorities: Kurds and Marsh Arabs.  If you did demand democracy you would turn up dead, if you turned up at all, and so politics was not particularly high on the agenda.  Saddam had managed the blockade to make the West look like the bad guys, so the US hardly started with a great popularity rating.  And just look at what happened last time a President Bush encouraged the Iraqis to rise up…

What most people want is not democracy and freedom, but the knowledge that tomorrow will be no worse, and preferably a little better, than today.  The invasion removed any semblance of law and order, basic necessities have become rare, water and power was even more unreliable, and the high unemployment rate has got higher. 1000’s of civilians have been killed, and the Iraqi economy has been made all shiny and 21st century- i.e. sold to Western Big Business.  In the first few days after the capture of Baghdad US soldiers guarded the oil ministry, while looters emptied the museum 50 yards away.  The coalition looks like an army of occupation, with a puppet government.  Is it surprising a ‘resistance’ movement grows up?

Les: Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki just announced an amnesty plan for insurgents that at first blush appears to bar amnesty for anyone who has attacked Iraqi police or military forces

He’s franticly clutching at straws and any straw will do but, it still won’t work.
His enemy is the koran as it will have nothing to do with democracy.
What a fuck-up.

If I were the Iraqis I would be more concerned with the insurgents attacking the Iraqis then the Insurgents attacking US forces.  The ones attacking US forces are just defending their homeland.  The ones attacking Iraqis are just making a political statement at the cost of innocent lives.

He [Saddam] wasn’t hurting most of them, and unfortunately humans are particularly good at ignoring the plight of strangers if it puts them in danger - remember a lot of the genocide was happening against minorities: Kurds and Marsh Arabs.

This statement is completely and absolutely false.
Saddam’s regime was one of the most domestically-deadly in modern times. To give you a sense of how these none-to-few victims were often selected:

...there are also a handful of survivors from the mass killings at Hillah, where the Ba’ath party rounded up around 2,000 locals and machine gunned them into pits as part of savage reprisals for the 1991 Shia uprising.

People were silent because if you even mentioned this actions you usually became yourself a victim of arrest, or worse. To put things in perspective, another quote from the same piece (dated 2004):

Although the total number of dead is now thought to be less than last year’s initial estimate of up to 300,000, it still represents one of the largest acts of genocide of modern times.

Again, this was a piece written in 2004.  However, another piece states the following:

...the US Regime Crimes Liaison Office said there were 180-222 grave sites around Iraq and that estimates of the number of people killed under Saddam ranged from 100,000 to 300,000. “It’s impossible to get to them all,� he said.

The above article from the Irish Examiner was published today, 27-June-2006.  Saddam *was* hurting, compared to all other modern regimes, a lot of Iraqis. Most Iraqis knew or know someone who was either killed or brutally tortured by his regime.

-
sources in-order of quote:
http://scotlandonsunday.scotsman.com/index.cfm?id=735522004
http://www.irishexaminer.com/breaking/story.asp?j=80065938&p=8xx66z4x&n=80066318

I do remember an NPR interview before the war, with an inspector who described the basement of a police station as having ‘meathooks on ceiling tracks’.  Horrifying, if true.