E-mailed this to a liberal friend today in response to a ‘Yeah, but they still haven’t found any WMDs’ message from him:
No matter what one thinks of the American presence in Iraq, it is beyond my comprehension how any American cannot view today’s news as glorious.
No, we haven’t ‘stopped the threat of terrorism’. Not even close. There are so many madmen out there, so many weapons (and potential weapons) of mass destruction, and so many easy methods with which to disseminate them, that I’m afraid terrorism is here to stay. It’s the price we humans are going to pay from here on in for the deadly combination of scientific progress and burgeoning violent/militant/radical ideologies.
But does that mean we should simply throw up our hands in dismay and take to basket weaving?
I had (and still do) mixed emotions about our invasion of Iraq. I believed (and still do) that the stated reasons were other than expressed by the administration (although I do not believe the reasons were as duplicitous as you do). I believe that an over-riding reason (although not the only one) which dragged us into Iraq was the pre-emptive protection of Israel, in which I very strongly believe. Yet, the fact that the administration has not been honest enough to lay that reason on the table, no matter the political repercussions, has not sat well with me for nine months.
Another reason I was not necessarily in favor of our incursion is the fact that, as bad as Hussein’s atrocities (and threat of more of the same) have been, I believe there are more delicate/flammable regimes that require our attention – with North Korea sitting much higher on the list. (I truly believe that Kim Jong-Il has already reprocessed, or will soon, thousands of spent fuel rods, and could well have possibly six nuclear warheads at his disposal. I worked in the design of nuclear fuel elements in the seventies. Reprocessing fuel rods into plutonium isn’t that difficult, or time-consuming, a process).
With that said …. having gone into Iraq, we cannot now leave. Our history is replete with international jobs left half done – not the least of which was Bush I’s promise to carry through after the Gulf War, leaving many thousands of revolutionary Iraqis who took him at his word as sitting targets for Hussein’s killing machine.
As for the weapons of mass destruction, I do not believe that was the over-riding reason for our incursion into Iraq. But neither do I believe that they did not exist in pre-war Iraq. The simple behavior of Saddam prior to our actions spoke volumes. Had he not been producing WMDs, he would have been forthcoming with UN inspectors – and he was anything but. Many mobile labs, and the like, whose sole purpose is the manufacture of chemical and biological weapons, have been discovered. The fact that the weapons themselves have not simply means that they have been moved (most likely to either Syria or Iran).
Yet the capture, and hopefully the eventual execution, of Hussein cannot be downplayed. He is a mass murderer of the worst sort – one who saw fit to brutally, often under extremely torturous circumstances (which served no purpose other than the satisfying of an abominably sadistic nature), murder hundreds of thousands of his own people. Had Hussein and his bloody Ba’athist network remained in power, his legacy might eventually have rivaled the killing fields of Cambodia. Surely the need for mass graves would have continued under the administrations of all of the current democrat presidential candidates, or under the watchful, but relatively disinterested, eyes of the UN or EU.
Were I the mother, or wife, or sister, or daughter of one of the three hundred or so Americans who have died since the war began, I might be looking at the reasons for, and the current results of, this war with a much more justifiably jaundiced eye. My heart breaks for the survivors of our war dead. But I do believe that, even under such heartbreaking circumstances, I would be cheering today’s capture of one of the most brutal tyrants in the history of mankind.
How satisfying to see the creature who built himself multi-million dollar palaces, trimmed in gold, while most of his people lived in abject poverty, finally discovered living like an animal in a coffin-like hole in the ground.
I always knew he would receive justice after this life. But am so much more content to know that he will also receive punishment in the here and now. Yet what form of punishment could possibly be commensurate with the torment he unleashed on hundreds of thousands of his own, and the plans he no doubt had to extend the suffering beyond his own borders?
God bless all American and coalition troops. God bless the 4th ID!
~ joanie