[rwallace]

> Economic sanctions are an alternative to war.

And frankly one of the reasons I think they should be taken off the table entirely is because they are far too easy an alternative. At least in war, some of the victims have their faces broadcast on television. The victims of economic sanctions are never heard of except as dry statistics.

> Are you suggesting we should have bombed Iraq instead at the time? Or just let Saddam do what he pleased?

Saddam had already been stopped from doing what he pleased. He had been comprehensively kicked out of Kuwait. It should have stopped there.

> Ironically, when the USA does nothing (Rwanda, Pol Pot, North Korea, Srebrenica) they are accused of complicity in inaction, yet when they do something, they are war criminals. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.

This is only a contradiction if the two kinds of accusations come from the same people.

[pekk]

I would much rather be subjected to economic sanctions than bombed, but I guess I don't speak for everyone. Maybe some people prefer to be bombed.

[rwallace]

That's probably because you live in a relatively wealthy country that would not be harmed so much by economic sanctions. One way to look at it is that that the economic sanctions against Iraq killed two or three orders of magnitude more civilians than the bombing campaigns of 1991 and 2003 put together. Another way to look at it is that if you were starving to death because of economic sanctions, you would probably change your preference very quickly.

In any case, I wasn't proposing to spend twelve years bombing Iraq instead of the economic sanctions. I was proposing that after Saddam had been kicked out of Kuwait, that should have been the end of the matter.