Sugarpie should study up on Russian/Soviet history where Soviet leaders slaughtered 100s of 1000s of their own people so they could stay in power. This is why countries familiar with Soviet history worry about KGB Putin. There is just no comparison of America at its worst vs Russia at its worst. The US defended Kuwait against an invasion by Iraq. Yes the worlds control of Oil is important. Yes Saddam did gas his own people the Kurds. That was the time to take out Saddam. I think Bush 2 just wanted to finish the job: Bush -1 seemed to know that would unleash sectarian violence and the coalition hadn't agreed to take out Saddam. Just to free Iraq. Bush 2 should have stayed with containing Saddam. Destroying Iraq and then having to rebuild it + the sectarian violence that still goes on today was not a good idea. Now Irans influence has grown in Iraq without Saddam around. So there was a lot to consider than Saddam being a murderous dictator. But the US did take out a Murderous dictator and his rotten family. The US was a big factor in stopping Hitler. The main factor in stopping Japan. The only factor in controlling Al queda/Bin Ladin religious fanatics. The USA has done a lot of good and made some mistakes along the way. The USA is a free country. Russia is an autocratic society. Putin went away and then he came back. Even when he went away he was running the country in the back ground. Our President is elected for 4 years and can run again possible be elected for 4 more years. But that is it. No possibility of dictators here. Everybody can be voted out. Just no comparison with the evil Russia can produce and has produced. In my opinion. History highlights that fact. Yea we dropped Nukes on Japan. But if the war had went on(and Japan was not about to surrender) there would have been a million more dead
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Purge. (Just one site of many on Soviet leaders horrendous acts in the past)
"The term "repression" was officially used to describe the prosecution of people considered counter-revolutionaries and enemies of the people by the leadership of the Soviet Union. The purge was motivated by the desire to remove dissenters from the Communist Party and to consolidate the authority of Joseph Stalin. Most public attention was focused on the purge of the leadership of the Communist Party, as well as of government bureaucrats and leaders of the armed forces, most of whom were Party members. The campaigns also affected many other categories of the society: intelligentsia, peasants and especially those branded as "too rich for a peasant" (kulaks), and professionals.[3] A series of NKVD (the Soviet secret police) operations affected a number of national minorities, accused of being "fifth column" communities. A number of purges were officially explained as an elimination of the possibilities of sabotage and espionage, mostly by a fictitious "Polish Military Organisation" and, consequently, many victims of the purge were ordinary Soviet citizens of Polish origin.
According to Nikita Khrushchev's 1956 speech, "On the Personality Cult and its Consequences," and more recent findings, a great number of accusations, notably those presented at the Moscow show trials, were based on forced confessions, often obtained by torture,[4] and on loose interpretations of Article 58 of the RSFSR Penal Code, which dealt with counter-revolutionary crimes. Due legal process, as defined by Soviet law in force at the time, was often largely replaced with summary proceedings by NKVD troikas.[5]
Hundreds of thousands of victims were accused of various political crimes (espionage, wrecking, sabotage, anti-Soviet agitation, conspiracies to prepare uprisings and coups); they were quickly executed by shooting, or sent to the Gulag labor camps. Many died at the penal labor camps of starvation, disease, exposure, and overwork. Other methods of dispatching victims were used on an experimental basis. One secret policeman, for example, gassed people to death in batches in the back of a specially adapted airtight van.[6][7]
The Great Purge was started under the NKVD chief Genrikh Yagoda, but the height of the campaigns occurred while the NKVD was headed by Nikolai Yezhov, from September 1936 to August 1938, hence the name Yezhovshchina. The campaigns were carried out according to the general line, and often by direct orders, of the Party Politburo headed by Stalin.
The Great Purge has provoked numerous debates about its purpose, scale and mechanisms. In the 1950s American scholars proposed a structural explanation of the Great Terror: as a totalitarian system, Stalin’s regime had to maintain its citizens in a state of fear and uncertainty, and recurrent random purging provided the mechanism (Brzezinski, 1958). Robert Conquest emphasized Stalin’s paranoia, focused on the Moscow show trial of “Old Bolsheviks”, and analyzed the carefully planned and systematic destruction of the Communist Party leadership as the first step toward terrorizing the entire population. In the mid-1980s, John Arch Getty, an American historian of the revisionist school, contested Conquest’s interpretation. He argued that the exceptional scale of the purges was the result of strong tensions between Stalin and regional Communist Party bosses who, in order to deflect the terror that was being directed at them, found innumerable scapegoats on which to carry out repressions. In this way, they demonstrated their vigilance and intransigence in the struggle against the common enemy. Thus, the Great Terror developed into a “flight into chaos” (Getty, 1985)./................."
