Posted on 12/16/2003 6:58:31 AM PST by SJackson
Criticism of the U.S. effort to depose Saddam Hussein — and the central role of Baathist Iraq in international terrorism — has rested on four pillars.
The first pillar — that the war in Iraq was a failure without the capture or death of Saddam Hussein — came crashing to an ignominious end Saturday night on a farm near Tikrit. The tyrant who struck terror in the hearts of millions of his own citizens, the butcher who sent hundreds of thousands of people to unmarked graves across Iraq, is now a prisoner.
The irony is great that a man who buried so many victims in the earth was himself pulled from the ground, alive and safe, by those sent to liberate his long-suffering country.
Images of a tired and haggard Saddam, compliantly being checked for lice, opening his mouth for a medical examination and the fact that the self-styled, modern-day Saladin gave up without resistance all will have a profound psychological impact.
That impact will be felt first and foremost in Iraq where, as British Prime Minister Tony Blair said, a shadow has been lifted from the Iraqi people. Ordinary Iraqis can now confidently believe that their march toward democracy is irreversible. Saddam and his henchmen will never return to power and exact retribution.
By the same token, Baathist dead-enders must now unequivocally understand that their terrorist attacks against coalition forces and free Iraqis are futile.
Their extremist allies, both secular and religious, across the Arab and Islamic world are similarly demoralized. Their symbol of defiance, the man who waved swords and fired rifles into the air before adoring crowds, surrendered. He neither fought nor took his own life.
The second pillar of criticism asserts that Saddam's Iraq had nothing to do with the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks against the United States. That pillar is also crumbling.
...snip...
The third pillar of criticism ridicules the notion that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction or programs to produce them. This pillar, too, is crumbling.
...snip...
The final pillar of criticism rests on the failure, thus far, to capture or kill Osama bin Laden. Saddam's capture demonstrates that American intelligence is working, and that the discovery of bin Laden's whereabouts, like the disposition of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, is only a matter of time.
...snip...
(Excerpt) Read more at jewishworldreview.com ...
The first pillar — that the war in Iraq was a failure without the capture or death of Saddam Hussein — came crashing to an ignominious end Saturday night on a farm near Tikrit.But don't you understand how the left will spin this? They always knew that Saddam would be captured. Saddam's capture changes nothing.
Just like they predicted doom before the war and then after the war changed the party line to: We always knew the US would win the first phase of the war. That means nothing.
In the words of Lieberman, they are living in spider-holes of denial.
(Have to give the old RAT credit, that is a GREAT catch-phrase.)
-- It's no big deal, because he has been too busy hiding and hasn't been ccordinating the attacks anyway. Anyway, he was just a sick old man.
-- A Democrat president would have found him sooner.
-- We already had captured him, and were just hiding the information until it would do the most political good for Bush.
-- The capture will only create more anti-US violence because it will really enrage the terrorists.
-- We are violating his human rights.
-- Finding Osama was the easy part, but how are we going to dismantle world-wide terrorist networks?
-- If he is proven dead, that only means that we executed him without a trial to silence him so the world would never find out about Bush's complicity in 9-11.
Listen, they cay spin this all they want, but reality will defeat them at every turn. Those on the left who want to avoid looking like fools (and there are some, including many of those who have some connection with reality) will have to cut their losses and look elsewhere for ways to bash Bush and America.
The capture of Saddam Hussein is huge, historic. It can not be undone by rhetoric, which is increasingly the only refuge of the left. It is of a piece with the fall of the Soviet Union. The left has no successes to which to refer, and is increasingly the realm of fools and the mad, and of those who know how to make use of them.
(steely)
When are people going to understand that he was being checked for weapons (as in a sharp object in his hair) and cyanide capsules in his teeth? Above all else, we didn't/don't want him doing what Goering or Himmler did and escaping true justice.
Hey, jonny, case you hadn't heard, we got saddam. And it cost incredible amounts of your money, just tons and tons of the stuff. Forget the fact that we're winning the war, just concentrate on the fact that, come next april, more of your money is going to be taken to support a war that in the long run, will make us safer. Not that it matters because there are more important things, like, your money.
(better be glad there was a President Wilson, otherwise, you'd have to find something really significant to whine about)
Lieberman is the best of a bad lot.
I might be offended if:
1. You actually said something truthful, and
2. You were a person of substance.
(You're going to have to get some new insults, these are getting a little threadbare.)
Your "principle" would get us all killed.
Johnny, like the Deaniacs, you and Ron Paul are becoming more and more irrelevant.
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