Operation Red Dawn, Dec 13, 2003 - How do you perceive Saddam's capture?

I remember one of my troops tugging on the end of my sleeping bag and saying "WE GOT SADDAM!" I looked out of my bag and said "You woke me up for that S!#$%!" I swear he thought we were going to get on a plane and go home the next day. Saddam was no different than any other tyrant who kept his power by coersion, corruption, fear, torture, and control of the media. I swear that American policy makers have an attention span that only goes back 10 years. When a nation is invaded by someone like that (Kuwait in the Gulf War) You remove them....violently. When you go to their turf and think that removing the top dog will turn the country into "Democracy East" you have to undo decades of deviant behavior and corrupt though processing. Their entire society is structured around coping with a madman in charge. With every major change that was injected into their society, other symbiont structures continued to deteriorate. You don't continue to pull off the layers of an onion hoping to get to that sweet caramel center. It isn't there.

It was good to have captured him, and allow him to be tried and sentenced by his country's legal system and then executed by them for his crimes. In the long run as with a lot of things implemented by the Coalition Authority immediately following us taking the country, it set in motion some of the issues we are dealing with today from ISIS....but at the same time, he had to go.

It was important for 2003, but the problem with Iraq was that it was really 2-3 different wars all rolled into one. His capture may have disuaded the hold-out Ba'ath regimists from continuing, but it did nothing about the Shia insurgency in the south nor the AQI backed insrugents in Anbar. Each one of those mini-wars was against a different insurgent group with different demographics, tactics and goals.