Quote Originally Posted by slapout9 View Post
There is some Strategic Wisdom in the above statement. The person/regime that started the whole mess needs to feel the pain not the general population.
Not to bypass the government, but to recognize now, like never before in history, populaces are empowered to act out.

The measures we put in place to punish Iraq (the state) and Saddam (the dictator), did neither, but did punish the Iraqi populace horribly. The young men who formed the core of the Iraqi resistance movement to counter the US invasion grew up in an environment deprived of resources (food, meds, etc) by the U.S.; with U.S. planes dropping bombs on regular occasions; and Saddam telling them that everything would be great if it wasn't for the oppressive acts of the Americans.

The global environment was changing, and we had not caught on to the new rules. Rules that demand that you do not write off the populace as irrelevant. Or perhaps we thought that the Iraqi populace would blame the hardships we placed upon them on Saddam? Were we that naive?

Such sanctions must be carefully designed today to take into account fully the super-empowered status of today's populaces. We must assess how they will be impacted, and how they will likely react. If we want to punish a dictator we need to have the moral courage to shoot him in the face, and not in the populace.