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Commenters To Dropbox CEO: Houston, We Have a Problem
theodp (442580) writes "On Friday, Dropbox CEO Drew Houston sought to quell the uproar over the appointment of former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to the company's board of directors, promising in a blog post that Rice's appointment won't change its stance on privacy. More interesting than Houston's brief blog post on the method-behind-its-Condi-madness (which Dave Winer perhaps better explained a day earlier) is the firestorm in the ever-growing hundreds of comments that follow. So will Dropbox be swayed by the anti-Condi crowd ("If you do not eliminate Rice from your board you lose my business") or stand its ground, heartened by pro-Condi comments ("Good on ya, DB. You have my continued business and even greater admiration")? One imagines that Bush White House experience has left Condi pretty thick-skinned, and IPO riches are presumably on the horizon, but is falling on her "resignation sword" — a la Brendan Eich — out of the question for Condi?"
Now George is a painter, Condi is on the board, Dick -- well, Dick is still a dick. So, are we supposed to forget or what? And forgive? Hard to do when we're still payin' the bills.
Everything in the Universe sucks: It's the law!
If you can't spell "you're", you're an idiot. An illiterate idiot....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
Same intolerant crap.
There are some things that shouldn't be tolerated. War mongering is one of them. Thousands of American families lost a son, brother, or husband in a pointless counter-productive war because of this woman's lies and incompetence. The number of Iraqi families affected is a hundred times higher.
Dropbox has the right to have her on their board. I have the right to speak my mind, and take my business elsewhere.
The real question is, "what does she bring to the table" as a member of the Board? Does her tenure as a faculty member in the Stanford School of Business matter? What about her time as the director of the Stanford Global Center for Business and the Economy?
Sounds like the same thing they did to the mozilla CEO. When will these loser knock this shit off? I dont like the woman either but there are other reasons to fault dropbox without bringing her into it
Yes; it's the same thing. The primary job of a member of the board is to be responsible to and represent the company to people outside the company. People are saying "either this is a bad person for the job or I don't like how Dropbox wants to be represented". Now Dropbox has to make a choice. Is Condi the person they want to represent them? Is Condi's image how they want to be. If yes, then she is the right person and if so then those other people should take their business where they want to.
Or perhaps we should take a page out of their playbook? why are they woman hating??? and shes black??? RACISTS!!!! You know thats what would be happening if the politics were the other way around
I find it interesting that you are explicitly proposing lying. You know that these things aren't true yet it's more important to you to win than to think about what's right.
How about discussing some actual issues. How about something worthwhile like "condi may have been batshit crazy about invading Iraq, but at least if we had her we wouldn't have this Obama idiot handing over Ukraine to the Russians without even as much as a trade blockade".
What i dont like is late comers to companies that get IPO, and then these get millions, ahead of the hardworking coders who started there from day 0.
I dont mind her there, but if the company IPOs for billions, she should not get a cent, as I cannot see anything she can contribute that would add to the book value or earnings values. /*
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
This goes beyond that.
Rice directly contributed to the waste of O($1 trillion) of taxpayer money, the loss of thousands of lives, and the torture of prisoners. That should make her persona non grata to any organization that gives a damn about not wasting public money for political gain, not murdering people, and not engaging in state violation of human rights. This isn't "gave some money to a dishonest and illiberal election campaign" (Eich). This is "shit on American values and wiped with the Constitution for good measure".
That's on top of the security/espionage concerns.
If Condi Rice were the checkout clerk at Safeway I'd refuse to do business with them.
Being intolerant of bigot homophobes is crap? Being intolerant of war mongering assholes is crap?
Here's a big FUCK YOU. Some things just should not be tolerated at all. Eich and Rice deserve to be called out for their bigotry and war mongering
She should be tried in the Hague tribunal for war crimes instead.
Hiring a war criminal and domestic-spying person may not change Dropbox's stance on privacy, but it shows another darker side of DB, it's business-at-the-expense-of-morality side.
Did they really think, "She approved the mass snooping of private data saved online, which certainly included targeting our infrastructure to breach our customers' privacy. Oh, we won't worry about that, we need her expertise, we'll hire her!".
Then again, writing the above paragraph, what the fuck was their stance on privacy then, if hiring her didn't make them ask themselves whether they're doing the right thing?
And how exactly will Dropbox succeed in the international scene, when all the foreign companies fucking realize that they're basically in-bed with the Washington "Elite", the same people that created and supported PRISM?!?
What time is it/will be over there? Check with my iPhone app!
Try SpiderOak. Free 2 GB, zero-knowledge, secure. Works on a load of OSs and devices. I'm a completely satisfied customer.
Or ... get a free dynamic DNS hostname (there are still plenty available) and take a few minutes to learn about SSH/SFTP (and SSHGuard if you are using passwords) and set up your own personal file server. It doesn't have to allow shell access.
Now the companies can do whatever they want because you did the little bit of learning it took not to care.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
In other news, Dropbox has announced that their appointment of Joseph Goebbels to their board of directors will not change their stance on Jews.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Well ganjadude. May I call you ganjadude? I imagine that is what your friends on 'your side' call you, right? 'ganjadude' sounds like that kind of a name.
You're assuming that the people who are angry about the appointment of Rice to this role are the same people who were angry about the Eich being given the CEO position at Mozilla.
You're also roughly stating that because there are other reasons to dislike Dropbox, it is inappropriate to complain about their choice of someone who has historically be pro-surveillance and supportive of state-sanctioned torture (in certain contexts, like the state doing the torturing for the US). I isn't really 'inappropriate' to complain about both the color and performance of a car, and likewise I don't think that disliking some other attribute of Dropbox reasonably precludes me complaining about their choice of board members.
I didn't much like the way that Eich was attacked for his support of Prop 8, even though I didn't agree with Prop 8. Eich's views on same-sex marriage really don't relate Mozilla (I don't think), and they don't really make him a bad or nasty person either - at least, not themselves without knowing the reasoning behind them.
That Rice previously demonstrated support of intensive surveillance by government does directly relate to Dropbox. I think that's a perfectly reasonable thing to criticise. I think that her support of torture and extraordinary rendition makes her an unpleasant person, but I'm not sure that so much relates to her role at Dropbox.
Your obsession with what 'they' do, those dirty liberals, is slightly bizarre and makes you sound like a crazy person. Also, you're presenting a weak caricature of liberals and then pretending it is reality. That doesn't make you sound clever, or steadfast in your role as an opponent of liberals. It makes you sound like someone who is to polarized to be able to think straight.
Right! To be fair, it's really hard someone to find someone for your board of directors who isn't a war criminal.
The choice was between Condoleeza Rice and Slobodan Milosevic and he backed out due to health reasons. I understand they sent feelers out to Joseph Kony, but he thought they were children's arms, so he cut them off.
Welcome Condi! Maybe a little more money will help you sleep at night, because you're looking a little tired, girl.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Trolling grammar nazis just makes you a different kind of idiot
The text book reason to put someone on the Board of Directors of a company is for their expertise in the business. She has NONE.
Condie Rice is a bureaucrat - a shitty one at that.
She is there for one reason - connections.
If you or I had a job history like her's, we would be unemployable. But for the ruling and CEO class, being a fuck up means nothing as long as you know the right people.
The issue has nothing to do with Iraq. Nor the fact that she's a woman, or that she is Black. The real issue here is that in the wake of Snowdon's revelations about widespread surveillance of the general public by three letter government agencies, a former National Security Advisor is being appointed to the board of a widely used online storage site that has thus far managed to convince some people that it is on the side of privacy.
I find it very amusing how the tune has changed with regards to how vote with their wallet and corporate moral character.
For the longest time the argument was "Well if you don't like company x don't buy their products!". With the implication being that if you don't actually stop, then you are just a whiner or a hypocrite. But now people really are taking their business elsewhere. The actions of a company or the people that represent a company is effecting the bottom line. Yet somehow old "vote with your wallet" is no longer acceptable. Somehow judging a company based on it's moral character is an assault on free speech, maybe even down right persecution!
For a long time people (on Slashdot especially) have been warning of the dangers of putting your data in the cloud. Of the amount of personal information that can be gleaned from your web browsing habits. That that big business is cooperating with the government (willingly or not) in a massive breach of privacy. So how and can anyone be surprised that customers demand moral character from leadership of companies to whom we are handing over so much personal information?
If you had to make a choice between companies to store YOUR personal information and your choices are: Company A with Bruce Schneier on it's board of directors, and Company B with Dick Cheney on it's board of directors. Does anyone seriously think that difference shouldn't effect the decision?
I for one have no sympathy. Yes a company has every right to alienate their customers, but customers also have every right to vote with their wallets.
Actually, it was Clinton's CIA man (that remained on for Bush) that said the intelligence was a "slam dunk" on WMD. The day before Bush took office, the entire world's intelligence (including Clinton's) believed Iraq had WMD. The exception of substance was Russia.
The issue has nothing to do with gitmo. Nor the fact that he's a man, or that he is Black. The real issue here is the massive deficit that we now have, that was called unamerican when it was half as big, also the issues we have with drone warefare on americans without trial, and also obamacare
Yet We get called racists for that statement I just made all the time....
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
the Streisand Effect had a negative effect and in this case I think rice is toxic to dropbox and will also have a negative effect to their business
Just because the last three companies she was on the board of did not need to be sold out, it doesn't follow that she won't sell this one out. Remember, warrantless wiretapping began on her watch. As a former National Security Advisor, her ties to the intelligence community are strong.
Condi Rice is as black as Barack Obama's corporate lawyer wife. Condi Rice is utterly detested by her fellow black folks for going on a NYC Ferragamo shoe shopping spree and catching a Broadway Musical Comedy, Spamalot, quite literally as Hurricane Katrina came ashore in New Orleans and her brothers and sisters were fighting for their lives. Quite literally fiddling while Rome burned. You forgot, huh? Here's snopes.com to reminds you...
http://www.snopes.com/katrina/...
"...That evening, upon arriving at the Palace Hotel, I flipped on the television. Indeed, the hurricane had hit New Orleans. I called Henrietta, who said that the main issue was making sure our people were safe. She'd also convened a departmental task force because offers of foreign assistance were pouring in. I called Secretary of Homeland Security Mike Chertoff, inquiring if there was anything I could do. "It’s pretty bad," he said. We discussed the question of foreign help briefly, but Mike was clearly in a hurry. He said he'd call if he needed me. I hung up, got dressed, and went to see Spamalot.
The next morning, I went shopping at the Ferragamo shoe store down the block from my hotel, returned to the Palace, and again turned on the television. The airwaves were filled with devastating pictures from New Orleans. And the faces of most of the people in distress were black. I knew right away that I should never have left Washington."
... what?
Do you even know what the word means? Christ.
Perhaps if you are a company which should have privacy concerns right up at the top of your list of to dos you should not appoint a board member who by all accounts gives not a shit for privacy concerns?
By the by, wouldn't life be the tits if I had no background in tech other than abusing it but had political connections as 99% of my resume and could land sweetheart preIPO deals like this?
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
I have my own domains and do this with tunnelled rsync to a NAS4Free box, though for long term storage I like SpiderOak (and TarSnap). SpiderOak keeps historical versions and dedupes the data.
Trolling is a art,
Yeah Iknowright!??! It's just "intolerance" to be concerned that a major file-sharing service has on their board someone who openly advocates government surveillance and with strong connections to groups in charge of government surveillance. Damn those "intolerant" people.
My other UID is three digits.
should her life be ruined over the fact that she made some mistakes while in government?
yes. when you 'make mistakes' at that kind of level and it affects the WHOLE WORLD in a hugely negative way, YES. 1000 times yes.
next question?
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
>*that's sarcastic in case you can't tell, but hopefully it'll help point out that the left needs to lay off the racist card so hard*
No, it's actually the right that needs to lay off the "race card" card. Seriously, every time they bring up some pointless complaint about Obama, they whine defensively that they're only restrained from criticism because they'll be called racists.
No shit, when your complaint is that Obama's a Kenyan Marxo-Islamic Fascist Communist, that's going to happen.
Doesn't mean you can't find some legitimate complaint to make about Obama, but the conservative right can't even manage that most days of the week.
Nerd != left wing.
Ex secretary of state != Matters.
Now if you're a leftist with unrealised dreams of punishing GWB, you might persuade yourself otherwise.
Democracy is a sheep and two wolves deciding what to have for lunch. Freedom is a well armed sheep contesting the issue
Eich's views on same-sex marriage don't make him a bad person, any more than having the view that starving children should be fed makes you a good person. However, the second those views manifest into actions, whether it's giving money to a charity to feed those children or to an organization attempting to legalize against gays, they do push your alignment towards good or evil, respectively.
No one can see into your heart, so no one can judge it, but the second you bear fruit it can, will and should be judged. And Eich's fruit was - correctly, in my view - judged to be no different than that of those who opposed "miscegenation": rotten. And so he was cast aside, out of the way of someone better.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
Dropbox starts scanning your files and prevents you from sharing what *it thinks* are copyrighted materials, and instead, you guys bitch and moan over some Hollywood-celeb-type bullshit?
"Dropbox has the right to have her on their board. I have the right to speak my mind, and take my business elsewhere."
The problem is, though, you do business with hundreds of other companies. Have you vetted their board of directors and leadership to see if they follow your political views as well? Or are you only picking on Rice and Dropbox because she was in the news for a few years and they popped up on Slashdot? You do realize there are many other Bush administration officials currently in leadership roles in other major corporations?
There are some things that shouldn't be tolerated. War mongering is one of them. Thousands of American families lost a son, brother, or husband in a pointless counter-productive war because of this woman's lies and incompetence. The number of Iraqi families affected is a hundred times higher.
But you do tolerate warmongers. You seem completely predisposed to tolerate Saddam's warmongering, crimes against humanity, support for terrorism, and many other crimes.
The Iraq war wasn't pointless or counter-productive. Saddam is gone. His psychopathic sons that would have been even worse, and who stood to inherit power from him, are gone. Iraq is now a democracy, albeit a troubled one, and they are rebuilding the country from the ruin of Saddam's mismanagement. Iraqi oil money is no longer being spent to build huge palaces for Saddam and build illegal weapons but is instead helping to build Iraq's future. Iraq is no longer a threat to peace and stability of the entire region.
The price for that was by historical standards very low for the US, and below Saddam's long term average of death and destruction for Iraq.
If you oppose warmongering you are on the wrong side of this. You should oppose Saddam, not the US, and not blame Rice.
Dropbox has the right to have her on their board. I have the right to speak my mind, and take my business elsewhere.
You certainly do have the right to be wrong on the facts and wrong on the politics.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
USA had absolutely no grounds to remove Saddam Hussein from the power.
The only reason they received U.N mandate is because they fabricated the WMD evidence and outright lied at the hearing.
On top of it they captured people - detained unlawfully without a charge or trial and tortured during their captivity.
Condi Rice and the rest of the Bush Jr. administration should be tried for their crimes.
+1 Insightful
Yes, there are very legitimate reasons to dislike some of Obama's policies but the rightwingnuts have wasted years with birther stupidity, obstinate obstruction of things they previously supported to the point where the GOP Senate Leader filibustered his OWN bill!!
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
Or show up on someone else's doorstep. Close enough, right?
The "only following orders" defence was invalid 70 years ago. Why do you think it is valid now?
"Wait. Something's happening. It's opening up! My God, it's full of apricots!"
Heh.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
If killing people and attacking countries is enough for you to call for invasion and hanging, I assume you would be fine with the US being invaded and roughly a gazillion people being finally tried for their crimes?
And why stop with Saddam? There are so many way more brutal dictators around the world, so what gives? Are you unaware that the US govt actively supported worse than him, or are you just chosing to ignore it? Don't even pretend: his crime wasn't that he "invaded his neighboring country", but that he did so on his own accord, disobeying the US. That's what made him an enemy, not the gassing or being a dictator. And then there is the fact that the US was always keen on controlling the oil in that region... so either you play along or you get replaced, that is all; how brutal you are doesn't play into it other than that you get lauded for it while you follow orders, and demonized otherwise. Saddam was an asshole, but that doesn't make the US govt less of a war profiteering, hypocritical BS expedition, or you less of an useful idiot, who essentially gets to pay big money to have blood on your hands. Sorry, I know nobody wants to hear something like that, but step one to fix things is to stop pretending you're not being played like a piano.
The world is far better off with Saddam's regime being replaced by a democratic government.
Tell that that to the thousands of Iraqi's WE KILLED to make that happen.
We probably killed or led to the death via our war of more Iraqi's than Saddam did -- and I'm not forgetting that Saddam attempted genocide of Kurd's in the 80s either.
Indeed -- but that doesn't matter.
When Bush pushed Colin Powell to do something unethical, he pushed back. He lost his job and kept his integrity.
Condi made the opposite choice.
> The Iraq war wasn't pointless or counter-productive.
It's just too bad we lost it. What's stepping in as the US leaves is a puppet government, doomed to fall to the even more genocidal religious leaders, the very "terrorist" factions that Sadam would never have allowed to threaten his power.
Are you now or have you ever been a conservative?
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Killing and torture are not the same, by any measure.
They might not be the same, but they're both evil, or at least by my standards. Do yours differ?
[End Of Line]
What i dont like is late comers to companies that get IPO, and then these get millions, ahead of the hardworking coders who started there from day 0.
I dont mind her there, but if the company IPOs for billions, she should not get a cent, as I cannot see anything she can contribute that would add to the book value or earnings values. /*
Actually, when IPO time rolls around people with "names" can add a great deal to the IPO. I can certainly believe that a former Secretary of State and National Security Advisor might have contributions to make on the "privacy and security" front, which is the focal point of the criticism. That aside, the IPO's that I have been involved in always included bringing in people with the right resume in high level posts at the last minute. That way the big institutional investors who are looking in to the company can say "Aha, I see they have big name official on the board, and look, they have the former CIO from Transamerica. They have all the right people in place to move the company forward!" And yes, it pissed me off that someone who had nothing to do with building the company made more than I did (by a couple of orders of magnitude) on the IPO. But Mr. Analyst working for the big investment group doesn't want to hear "we have this great guy who is super-bright and has been working 100 hours a week since the beginning as CIO".
But that is irrelevant to the major shareholders - they are simply asking themselves "can we make 30% more if we bring in this handful of people for the IPO?" If they can make an extra $200 million by spending 20 million, they'll do it every time. Once the VC guys get involved, loyalty kinda flies out the window.
So I guess the moral of the story is, make sure you get paid on the initial investments, because that might be the last bite of the apple you get.
Germany also declared war on the US, and tried to convince mexico to invade.
Just as United States had "no grounds" to remove Hitler from power. Nazi Germany did not attack the United States in Pearl Harbor. Did United States illegally fight the war against Nazi Germany, too? Everyone knew that it was Imperial Japan which attacked Pearl Harbor.
Ridiculous comparison. Germany had invaded nearly all of continental Europe and North Africa, and the US barely lifted a finger. Know your history... prior to Pearl Harbor, a large portion of this country wanted little to do with Nazi Germany and what was going on in Europe, beyond what money they could make from trade. Few in the US were concerned about how Germany was treating its people, or the people it invaded. The economy was finally showing signs of pickup after the depression, and nobody wanted war. Germany was Europe's problem, not ours.
The US first declared war only on Japan after Perl Harbor. Then Germany then declared war on the US, according to its treaty with Japan. It was only then the US declared war on Germany. Then we kick everyone's butt, without asking permission or crying about BS WMDs. Then we rebuilt our former enemies with the Marshall Plan and hired what Nazi scientists we could get our hands on to run NASA.
I don't recall a wartime ally of Iraq attacking our naval base in Hawaii. I don't recall the US declaring war on that allay as a result of the attack. And I don't recall Iraq declaring the war on the US in response. Iraq couldn't even succeed in invading a neighbor less than 1/10th its size with no military.... They had no scientists useful for a space program. Aside from the ethical implications, nobody worried about invading Iraq. It was clear we would win that one. To compare the lead-up to the Iraq invasion with WWII is a fantasy - a fantasy that some fans of Lil' Bush's administration apparently hold to this day.
And the US did nothing to adequately rebuild Iraq - not that there was much we could do beyond inserting another iron-fisted dictator.
About the only thing that was really the same between WWII and the Iraq war was that we kicked ass. But kicking Iraq's ass kind of looses its luster without the threat of enslavement by Nazis.... Perhaps that is why some still hold onto this comparison of Iraq to Nazi Germany - its lipstick on a pig.
The world is far better off with Saddam's regime being replaced by a democratic government.
Next?
What democratic government? Iraq was left as essentially anarchy. Perhaps replacing Saddam with anarchy is better - I don't know.
I do know that Saddam didn't bother me or anyone I know here in the US any more than the anarchy that is there now. I also know that my tax dollars and some people I know went to go blow things up and kill people in Iraq, and some other tax dollars and some other people I know went to try and rebuild schools and sewers only to see those things blown up and the Iraqis that helped them hunted and killed.
I don't know enough about Iraqi culture to judge Saddam or Iraq... But it does appear that we have wasted a lot of time and effort and lives on something that really wouldn't have mattered in the grand scheme of things.
Saddam Hussein had declared war on the United States. He even tried to assassinate a US President. Oh, and if "declared war" is a justification for invasion, does that mean that Hitler was justified in invading France? France did issue a formal declaration of war a year before Hitler's invasion. The truth is that our war on Iraq was just as if not more justified than our war on Germany. He was allied with our enemies, he took steps to harm us and our allies. He wasn't successful as much as we thought he was, but he was on a war path against us. And had he not been removed, no one knows where we would be today.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
Actually Saddam didn't keep terrorists out of Iraq, he provided them refuge, financing, and training. He just didn't have much to do with al Qaida. When al Qaida started conducting terrorist attacks in Iraq it resulted in massive loss of life for Iraqis which resulted in a large drop in support for al Qaida in the Arab and Muslim world. Their financing was significantly reduced, and many of their agents were captured or killed. Part of the reason that Afghanistan settled down for several years was the shift in effort from Afghanistan to Iraq by al Qaida. Eventually al Qaida was forced to flee Iraq and Afghanistan started heating up again. Al Qaida would have been stronger if it had not gone to Iraq.
The rate of worldwide Terrorist attacks have gone up since we've invaded Iraq. If the goal of the Iraq invasion was reducing worldwide terrorism, we did not achieve that goal. One may justify the Iraq invasion as a fight against terrorism, but if that is the case then invading Iraq was a failure. Rice was one of the key leaders in that failure.
I'm sure Rice's failures with the Iraq war will help Dropbox the way Bush's failures with the Rangers helped America.
"should her life be ruined over the fact that she made some mistakes while in government?"
A question that could be asked of any war-criminal.
Most of her colleagues have received promotions and honors for their failures, so I can see how this might seem unfair from her point of view.
But let's quit thinking about fair for her for just a moment and think about fair to her victims. US soldiers and foreign civilians, dead, maimed brutalized, thousands and thousands of them. Think about it from their point of view for a moment instead of hers. Think about it from the point of view of the relatives of her victims.
And then think about DB customers. Paying customers, mind you, not eyeballs at facebook or google but real live paying customers. They deserve a little respect too. Not a huge amount, perhaps, but at bare minimum keeping the likes of Condy Rice outside the walls is called for. Hiring her, and saying they were proud of it?
No one with two working brain cells could possibly trust them after that. DB is dead.
Eich is a rather different situation. Eich's 'crime' was political speech protected by the first amendment - not a crime at all, however wrong-headed, and with no connection to his work. Condy's situation is different on every count.
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
but lying to the American people to stage an invasion of Iraq, a country without ICBMs (and their inherent ability to deliver nuclear destruction to America), was not just a crime, it was a TREASONOUS act for which the architects of the Iraq War (Bush, Cheney, Rice, and Rumsfeld) should be prosecuted and then executed.
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
When did Saddam Hussein attack America? He was a jerk, but he never attacked us even though we threatened the sovereignty of his nation by using no-flight zones which had not been approved by the UN. The US acted unilaterally against Hussein, or perhaps Bilaterally if you include the UK.
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
The US and its allies actually killed a relatively small number of Iraqis
As for what Saddam did:
Anfal ~ 180,000?
Another 10-20,000 in other atrocities?
Call it 200k?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...
Which figure are you arguing isn't valid? We're looking at 100k at least, civilians directly, and violently killed. The the larger numbers, showing indirect deaths... like people dying because they couldn't get to the hospital for X or Y or Z because we blew up all the infrastructure? Easily adds up to another 100k. Multiple estimates are in excess of 500k total. I don't think you can bleat "George Soros" and pretend those people aren't dead because of the war.
Not to mention we sacrificed another 4500+ allied lives to do all this too. Again far more than Saddam ever inflicted on us, even if you give him credit for 9/11 which would be asinine.
I'm VERY skeptical of your claim that we killed fewer Iraqi's than Saddam did, and I KNOW we tossed more allied lives than Saddam ever claimed.