I really appreciated hearing your perspective last night :) It made me think about a few things…I do agree brining ‘democracy’ to oppressed people is a noble intention. After all we can not turn a blind eye to the oppression, torture and killings used by Saddam against insurgents in order to maintain an iron fist control of the population in Iraq.

So it would be great if the US had abandoned the violent mechanisms of control used by Saddam… lets see... besides the 7000 or so killed in the invasion…It appears to me the US government has also resorted to killings to maintain control of the country as well. Are the killings of ‘insurgents’ that rebel against US more ‘just’ then the killings of those rebelling against Saddam? Ok maybe the US killings are not of the same ‘magnitude’ or we have more “noble” plans for the lives of Iraqis then that of Saddam or the current Iraqi ‘insurgents’. But if our intentions where so much more noble why would we be hiring the very thugs that used to benefit from Saddam Hussein’s regime (1). It seems to me if Iraqi liberation was our primary concern it would be a bad idea to hire the very people that where just recently oppressing the Iraqis. And if the US has such good intentions why do we have people in charge of operations that worked with Saddam after it was obvious Saddam did not have the best intentions. People who assisted and worked with Saddam have shown that human rights violations do not matter to them when we share “topics of mutual interest”(2), how can those same people be trusted to not resort to that same sort of abuses when mutual interest is present in the future leadership possibilities.

So I agree if motives for installing ‘democracy’ and freeing the Iraqi people from oppressive régime are ‘just’ motives, possibly even ‘just’ motives for the crimes we committed to peruse them. But I have a hard time being convinced those ideals are being perused seriously. When we do things like hire the people that we supposabley where removing from power, and invariably resort to similar oppressive tactics used by the ‘evil regime’ in order to maintain control of the country.

Ultimately it is the historical record of US governments installment of ‘democracies’ in past that really shapes my opinion of current US actions…I would really recommend reading some of Noam Chomsky formal writings, he has very well articulated and strong arguments about the nature of US foreign policy in the past 40 years. Here is an informal piece about Saddam’s capture he wrote this week.

Furthermore www.zmag.org is a really good resource for non-corporate news and editorial.
... In a side note I originally ran into Chomsky in my computer science theory courses as his work with unambiguous grammars had a big impact on computer language design.
1)http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A858-2003Nov4.html
“The U.S. administrator of Iraq has decided to conditionally support the creation of an Iraqi-led paramilitary force composed of former employees of the country's security services and members of political party militias.”
(I don’t know if the article is still online but that is a quote from it)
2) Rumsfeld comment about meetings with Saddam