People who feel the need to answer the canard that "if you were/are against the war in Iraq then you were/are for Saddam Hussein continuing in power" will soon have the perfect rebuttal. Former CIA asset Saddam Hussein Al-Tikrit is being replaced with current CIA asset
Ayad Allawi. If we are patient there will soon be a list of atrocities related to Allawi that we can cite to people who repeat that absurd lie.
They may have already started. Of course, there are a few problems, one is that while Hussein was no doubt a brutal tyrant, the stories about him are both well known and in some cases wild, untrue fantasies concocted by the Office of Special Plans and other Black Ops organizations in the government. In the case of Allawi, as long as he follows Washington's orders, such stories will be suppressed, spun and countered with lies. Just as any nasty story, no matter how untrue that could be spun about the former dictator found its way into the mainstream press, it will be unlikely that the things Iraq's new dictator actually does will make it into the establishment media. (Expect anything that does get over the wall to be attacked by ClearChannel's stable of populist demagogues.)
The thing to remember is that no one who make the "anti-war pro-Saddam" statement actually believes that. Nor do the people care if an Iraqi dictator is brutalizing Iraqis (much as they don't care that Islam Karimov is brutalizing Uzbekistanis). They just like to say it to put you on the defensive. After all, this war has been a debacle. The one thing that I learned from the war is that as bad as the Democrats are, the majority of Republicans (excepting a small number, like Representative Ron Paul) should never be allowed near the levers of power under any circumstances. Thus, in our two party system, the slightly less awful Democrats win by default. (By the way, I am aware that plenty of individual Democratic politicians are indeed worse than their Republican opponents, but I'm talking about en masse. It's a Hobson's choice, really. No choice at all.)
