Free Iraq

The TV news channels are live in the center of Baghdad.  Hundreds of Iraqis are gathered around a giant 3 or 4 story statue of Saddam Hussein.  Apparently no longer afraid of Saddam, they have put a long noose around the neck of the statue, and are pounding away at the base of it with a sledgehammer.  Amazing.  It continues to be absolutely mind-boggling that anyone has ever claimed that the Iraqi people didn’t want this war.  This news, along with so much of the news over the past 3 weeks, shows that the anti-war camp had entirely different, selfish motives for their position.

[Update:] Steve Den Beste says it well:

It’s got to be damned tough right now being a leftist antiwar columnist. Everything went wrong – which is to say, nothing went wrong. There doesn’t seem to have been any mass slaughter of civilians. The Americans stupidly refused to carpet-bomb Baghdad. The war went rapidly, and coalition casualties are extremely light. The bombs which have been dropped have stubbornly insisted on actually hitting what they were aimed at; none of them seems to have gone off course and hit an orphanage or an old people’s home. Some days it just seems as if there’s hardly any point in getting out of bed.

And what is now coming out about life in Iraq, and the way that the Iraqis are beginning to greet the invading army, is beginning to make it look as if they’re actually the good guys; it’s beginning to look a whole lot like liberation rather than brutal conquest. Facing all of that, it’s got to be damned tough trying to find some way of proving that you were right all along and that the war really, truly, was wrong – and still is.

Of course, there’s one easy way to do it: ignore all the evidence. See what you want to see; dismiss all the rest as being propaganda manufactured by the coalition. And, of course, it is a foregone conclusion that there’s no moral equivalence between the two sides. Naturally not! How can there be equivalence when it’s obvious that the Americans and British are much worse than Saddam’s regime?
...
In order to prove your case, all you have to do is to make up coalition atrocities. It’s obvious that using cluster bombs on civilians is a terrible crime. Never mind that the coalition hasn’t actually done such a thing; that doesn’t matter.

Posted by Anthony on 1 reply

Comments:

01. Apr 9, 2003 at 2:51pm by mark:

I wonder if the oh- so- righteous anti war lobby would be able to face the joyous, newly liberated Iraqi people and explain to them why they wanted them to be left to rot under Saddam Hussein. The blinkered ignorance of the anti war lobby, fuelled by nothing more than a bigotted hatred of Americans and an overwhelming sense of their own self importance has been exposed for what it is. Will they admit they were wrong? I doubt it. These peole are never wrong. Only THEIR opinion is of any value as far as they are concerned.  Claiming to be educated, they ignore the obvious historical parallels. These are people who would have let Hitler carry on exterminating millions of Jews, "because war is wrong".  They forget that it is only the sacrifices of others in war that gifts them with the freedom of speech that they so zealously exploit. War is painful, horrific, tragic, but the difficult truth is that sometimes it is necessary for the greater good. Remember Chamberlain trying to deal diplomatically with Hitler? Dictators and fanatics can only be removed by one method. This is the real world......  So respect to those people whose convictions were so strong that they were brave enough to stick their necks out to bring freedom and joy to frightened and oppressed people. Shame on those who advocated doing nothing.

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