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?
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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.