He did have other sources of income - and since your proposition that Saddam has "escaped", and that he got away with "billions of euros" is unsupported by any hard evidence - you haven't got any more idea of where he is than I do, and even less evidence about the amount of money he is carrying about with him - this is a poor counter-arguement, even by you abysmal standards.
Less likely. Your politicians are a batch of crooks without a moral fibre between them, much like Saddam, if less murderous, while al Qua'eda is a bunch of religious fanatics, with moral fibres sticking out in all directions.
For the record, I prefer your politicians - they serve their purpose and their vices aren't noticeably destructive.
Your idea of what's equitable.
You really are thick (or possibly disingenuous). The point about the heirachical structure of Japanese society was adddressed to the likely success of your occupation. Your occupation of Japan was relatively peaceful, without noticable evidence of organised resistance, because you had control of the king-pin in their rigid heirachy.
You haven't even captured the king-pin in the Iraqi heirachy, and if you did it would not do you anything like as much good. You are faced with active and energetic resistance in Iraq, and it is likely to persist - land borders can be quite porous. Making the sort of changes to Iraqi society that you were able to engineer in Japan (with the assistance of the emperor) could be a lot more difficult, and your eventual exit from the country may look more like your exit from Vietnam.
I do know enough not to fall into self-referential black holes, like your second last sentence.
Where I come from, that is known as ignoring inconvenient evidence.
The group you are identifying is your gullible toadies. Your true friends were trying to save you from theconsequences of your own fecklessness.
Absolutely. But now it seems that you need our help keeping the lid on the can of worms that you opened up in Iraq, where you invaded against U.N. advice and without UN sanction ....
And you survival was threatend by Saddam's regime in Iraq? That is the same lame argument you floated before the invasion, and it is still a lead balloon.
Why? One of the harder knots in the web you have woven is the perceived anti-Islamic aspect of your invasion. A U.N. sactioned anti-Saddam liberation, with Arab support, would have looked a lot less anti-Islamic.
So you claim.
Not all the academics at the University of Texas at Austin were football-loving red-necks. My wife's expertise about wine dates back to to that period of her life (though IIRR at least two of the relevent academics came from New Zealand).
And it took Martin Luther King to convert the paper equality into something vaguely approximating real equality. The coloured minority in Florida wasn't exactly over-represented during the last presidentail election.
Which is not to say that Australia's history presents the European invasion as anything beneficial to the aboriginal population. You've missed a number of decidedly repulsive episodes, including the genocide of the Tasmanian aborigines, and the revolting little incident where the skull of the last Tasmanian male aborigine was stolen from his body before the burial service.
I had my conciousness raised on that particular subject in my youth, and don't need to be reminded that Australia has its flaws. If I ever get back there and get to reclaim my right to vote, I'll be active in trying to correct some of them.
------- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen