Obama announces total withdrawl from Iraq

[K. A. Pital]

Having more political rights does not automatically translate into having more rights of any other sort. One has to realize these political rights in a certain fashion and have a working enforcement mechanism.

[Patroklos]

Heh, when Obama was running for the Presidency, December of 2011 was when I predicted we would have fully withdrawn from Iraq by if he was elected. Nice to see I guessed right.

December 2011 was the original date Bush set up post surge, not too hard to predict.

[Civil War Man]

I wonder, purely as a counterfactual, what would have happened if we'd left Saddam in place.

Would he still be alive? Probably; I doubt he'd be as vulnerable to the "Arab Spring" as Mubarak and Qaddafi turned out to be.

What would happen when he died, though? Would his country remain stable under some new tyrant? Or would it all fall apart and go to hell?

If the US had left Saddam in power, the Arab Spring would not necessarily have happened when it did. Some of the major catalysts for the uprisings would not have happened, including the multitude of fuckups that resulted from the US military adventures in the region and the financial crisis (which, while inevitable due to the subprime fiasco, could possibly have been delayed if there was not a multi-billion dollar per year money sink in Iraq) screwing up the world economy.