Rugoz wrote:What, right now?
No not right now, but as soon as there's a peace agreement. I favored sending NATO troops into Ukraine when I was concerned that Ukrainian defenses might collapse. I would still support this if things turn seriously bad for Ukraine. If NATO troops were to go in then Ukraine couldn't use that territory to attack Russian forces. So as long as Ukraine still thinks it can regain territory we should stay out.
That is somewhat ignorant. Switzerland always took the "armed" part of "armed neutrality" rather seriously, until the end of the cold war at least. It's not a complete pushover like Austria.
I'm one of Neville Chamberlain's strongest defenders. I think he was right to go the extra mile for peace at Munich and right to lead the British Commonwealth and the French empire into war in 1939. If Switzerland, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden and Norway had been willing to stand behind Chamberlain, his position would have been much stronger. We could have gone to war in March 1939, immediately when Hitler reneged on the Munich agreement and the great disasters of the western collapse in April, May and June of 1940 could almost certainly have been avoided. We would also have been in position to give prompt aid to Finland if Stalin had made the same demands he made in actuality.
Swiss failure to militarily ally with the West was less important in the Cold War, but their forces would still have been useful. If Germany and France fell to a Soviet advance, then Switzerland would be highly vulnerable to Soviet intimidation armed neutrality or no.
It's a bad example, since the "oil-for-food" program existed, explicitly aimed at helping the Iraqi people. Iraq rejected the program until 1995 by the way (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Na ... lution_706).
Saddam should have been overthrown in 1991. If you going to compare Saddam to Hitler as H Bush did, its a bit rich to then whine that he's not looking after the interests of his people.