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Comment by anthonymartinez | Hacker News Reader

for a while the Pinochet regime was our perfectly acceptable ally in Chile, even though we knew he was a mass murderer. its silly to throw up your hands just because the state department (itself not exactly a bastion of morality) says that its not illegal to do business with someone.

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Let me guess: you were against Bush's war in Iraq to take down Saddam. Why? Wasn't it moral to try to eliminate a known mass murderer?

Either is our duty to be the the moral arbiters of the world or it isn't. Which one is it?

One can be against a war and at the same time be against the government that war would remove. We killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, many of those troops were conscripts who didn't want to be there, yet we bulldozed them into the sand to suffocate, or burned them alive on the highway while they retreated.

There are more than two answers to everything.

> Wasn't it moral to try to eliminate a known mass murderer?

Given the context and the means. No.

We didn’t go in to Irag because Saddam was a mass murderer - we went in because Bush lied to America that Saddam was trying to get yellow cake uranium to build a bomb. A lot of Americans were against the war because we knew Saddam was not involved in 9/11 but Bush jr wanted to finish what his father couldn’t in the first gulf war. Honestly I would love it if we cared enough about mass murderers to actually go in and help, but I just don’t see that being a reason.

We tolerate quite a few mass murderers in charge of countries. We attacked that one because, supposedly, he had the tools and intent to attack the United States with chemical weapons.

Many were opposed to that war, not because they didn't feel it was right to eliminate a mass murderer, but because that was not the stayed reason. The stated reason in fact turned out to be false, and was arguably an abject lie.

In other words ... it's not a great example of what you're trying to claim.

We tolerate quite a few mass murderers in charge of countries

including our own…

Obviously that’s not true. Pinochet and Saddam were both direct product of US policy and intervention.

At the, end, Saddam ultimately pulled too hard on the leash and miscalculated his power. Murder, mass or otherwise and morality has little bearing on matters of empire.

Thinking otherwise is naive.

US was never a moral arbiter, isn't and will never be. Plenty of spaces would have been better of without US involvement

Because the war killed literally hundreds of thousands of people, and one can reasonably argue that while Saddam was bad, the overall amount of suffering caused by the war was worse than his excesses.

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