Video of Saddam's regime torturing Kurds

First, let me state that that has absolutely no relevance to what I stated and I'm just stating the actual facts of the matter. There are many political and strategic reasons why many Americans retracted their hawkish opinion towards Iraq especially as they saw the outcome unfold, and by the way, the Iraq War had nothing to do with Saddam being a dictator and that not was never stated nor implied as any reason for the war (he was replaced by a dictator anyways). It had everything to do with strategic energy interests (I'd read into some of Bush's and Cheney's first actions taking office, with both internally and with 3rd-party organizations drafting up strategic energy policy plans, all of which pointing to Iraq as by far the biggest detriment and enemy to US energy interests), under the fabricated facade of WMDs (supposedly with the capability of annihilating the US, as I recall Bush stating in at least one speech) and supposed al-Qaeda links.

Secondly, the country since 2003 has still be marred by tons of torture, extrajudicial killing, massacres, and sectarian violence especially in the mid-late 2000s, and all that combined with total chaos has made it worse.

Thirdly, two of those links are just about Uday who is unanimously known to actually be crazy, and not even people in the government liked him at all. One of the articles is about in the leadup to the Iraq War (meaning it can be heavily marred by pre-war propaganda and exaggerations). Also in that article is how assassins tried to murder him before he did any of that. All of this is assuming the story is even true. Like the Gulf War, many things in the lead-up to the Iraq War were either exaggerated or completely made up (like the incubators and the giant plastic shredders, lions, etc.). Regardless, apparently Iraqis feel the times nowadays are worse and far more chaotic.

One of the most interesting things about Saddam and Uday is propaganda takes two bad guys, and then tacks on lots of things that either didn't even happen or make it bigger than it actually was. This happens with all kinds of events and people, and it's not just the US and allied countries that do it either. Practically every nation does.

I can't speak for the White House article as I can't verify any of it. But many of the stories are downright outlandish like the lions thing, almost all of it comes from US/UK publications, and most of it is referring to events during the Iran-Iraq War and violent 1991 revolts, and considering all of these are selections posted on George Bush's White House page and from 2003, you can see this is just plain wartime propaganda, even though I can see a good amount of it actually being true, like some of the things about the soccer players. More importantly: Note that's in 2003. In the following years, things became much worse for Iraqis, and I'm sure some of the people who said those things (assuming they're all true) came to regret them, as has been the main theme in Iraq.

Even VICE which usually tries to find who to blame for certain issues where they're at (and usually try to find the people who would support their viewpoint) in one of the Iraq documentaries, interviewing Shi'ites who say at first in 2003, they were glad that the sanctions and Saddam were gone, but now things are much worse and things were better with him.

I've known Iraqi Kurds and Arabs who have told me similar stories. Brothers or cousins who were involved with militant or extremist groups and were involved in terrorist attacks or raids on civilians and military forces, and if captured were thrown in jail and that was that usually, sometimes eventually released. Even a middle-aged Kurdish guy who told me his brother was in peshmerga with a group raiding villages and attacking army outposts during the Iran-Iraq War of all occasions, and his brother was eventually captured and put in jail until the war's end. This was all considering his brother was a traitor to the state, a violent insurgent, and involved in murdering. Try doing that in the Netherlands (or in the US, even) and see how nicely you get treated. However, he admitted his brother and his brother's comrades knew what they were getting into and weren't victims.

/r/kurdistan Thread Parent Link - vid.me