Posted on 04/09/2003 7:45:02 AM PDT by Stand Watch Listen
A reporter asked General Vincent Brooks at a CENTCOM press briefing Doha, Qatar on Monday, before it was announced bombs were dropped on a restaurant containing Saddam, "What, to your mind, constitutes victory?…Can you claim victory while Saddam eludes you?"
While the question was actually a stupid question, it does indicate the massive confusion that passes for journalism in the media these days by reporters sitting in chairs far from the battlefield. This is not a battle waged with swords, after all, when the winner of the contest can cut off the head of the enemy and present it to the king. Just as many bodies were never found when the World Trade Center was demolished by terrorists, its possible, all the bodies of those killed in that restaurant may never be found.
What constitutes victory? Victory occurs when Saddam Hussein’s repressive regime ends. The only reason why a reporter or anyone else would ask such a stupid question is because they don’t know or don’t want to report what that regime has been doing for the past twenty plus years. According to a White House report on Life under Saddam Hussein, means that "many hundreds of thousands of people have died as a result of his actions - the vast majority of them Muslims."
A 2001 Amnesty International report stated:
"Victims of torture in Iraq are subjected to a wide range of forms of torture, including the gouging out of eyes, severe beatings and electric shocks... some victims have died as a result and many have been left with permanent physical and psychological damage."
I have received numerous e-mails from anti-war activists that tell me there is no difference between Saddam Hussein and President George W. Bush. Some of those e-mails have come from college professors and college students, which makes me wonder what is being taught these days in universities. According to anti-war activists such as the Campaign Against Sanctions on Iraq (CASI) at Cambridge University in England, it is that somehow George W. Bush who is responsible for a reported increase in deaths of children in Iraq in recent years, not Saddam Hussein. Oddly enough, for eight years in the 1980s, when Iran and Iraq were fighting a war in which an estimated two million Muslims died, anti-war activists conducted no demonstrations opposing it, nor have they said a word about the boxes of body parts found recently by Coalition troops that appear to be the mostly remains of Iranians killed in the 1980s.
Should America be expending its blood and its treasure to end a regime that tortures and slaughters its own people? Political correctness has morally equated Saddam Hussein´s 20 years of conquest of neighboring nations to seize their oil wells, with George W. Bush´s determination to put an end to his power and repression. Is there a moral equivalent?
On Sunday in a broadcast heard in 56 languages in most of the world, the president of the eleven million member Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Gordon B. Hinckley, dealt directly with that question. He said:
"Last Sunday as I sat in my study thinking of what I might say on this occasion, I received a phone call telling me that Staff Sergeant James W. Cawley of the U. S. Marines had been killed somewhere in Iraq. He was 41 years of age, leaving behind a wife and two small children.
"Twenty years ago Elder Cawley was a missionary of the Church in Japan. Like so many others, he had grown up in the Church, had played as a school boy, had passed the sacrament as a deacon, and had been found worthy to serve a mission, to teach the gospel of peace to the people of Japan. He returned home, served in the Marines, married, became a policeman, and was then recalled to active military duty, to which he responded without hesitation.
"His life, his mission, his military service, his death, seem to represent the contradictions of the peace of the gospel and the tides of war."
President Hinckley then gave a brief historical overview of war, beginning with account of the war in heaven in Chapter 12, verses 7-9 of Book of Revelations: "And there was war in heaven: Michael and his angels fought against the dragon; and the dragon fought and his angels, and prevailed not, neither was their place found anymore in heaven. And the great dragon was cast out, that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world: he was cast out into the earth, and his angels were cast out with him."
As we watch the news from Baghdad, especially as we watch Iraq's Information Minister Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf tell the world that "The US will surrender" it isn´t really all that hard to figure out who it is that is deceiving the world in the current conflict, the Arab media notwithstanding.
The Church leader went on to quote other Scriptures, including Isaiah, the Book of Mormon, Romans and even the British essayist Thomas Carlyle then asked and answered the rhetorical question: "Where does the Church stand in all of this?
"First, let it be understood that we have no quarrel with the Muslim people or with those of any other faith. We recognize and teach that all the people of the earth are of the family of G-d. And as He is our Father, so we are brothers and sisters with family obligations one to another."
If we are brothers and sisters with family obligations to those of a different race, religion and nationality, do we, then, have a moral responsibility to care enough about what happens to them to DO something?
According to LDS Church President Gordon B. Hinckley, we do. He reminded his worldwide audience that Jesus Christ himself said: "Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword." – Matt. 10:34
In this war in Iraq, debated by national leaders and condemned by most of the Muslims of the world, it is mostly Christian men like James Cawley who are dying to help liberate a group of Muslims from the grasp of an evil Muslim dictator who tortures and uses chemical weapons to kill his own people.
I must agree with President Hinckley who concluded: "I believe that G-d will not hold men and women in uniform responsible as agents of their government in carrying forward that which they are legally obligated to do. It may even be that He will hold us responsible if we try to impede or hedge up the way of those who are involved in a contest with forces of evil and repression."
The military is moving toward the "hot lilly pad" strategy for global projection of power. Free Iraq will be that lilly pad in the ME for as long as we need it to be. End result....fully staffed, fully equipped launching pad for excursions into Syria, Jordan, Iran, IF necessary. I am of the thinking that the round-heeled collapse of the Iraqi military in the face of forces that had to be moved across the globe joined with the new reality that those same forces are at the back door will alter both the world view and the behaviour of these countries.
I concede this to you. :-)
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