Posted on 01/03/2003 10:37:21 AM PST by HumanaeVitae
We've heard a lot at this point about the threat posed to the West, and partucularly us, the United States, by Saddam Hussein's pursuit of weapons of mass destruction. The Bush Administration makes the pragmatist's case: these weapons must be neutralized because of the objective threat they pose to the United States and its allies.
The opposition, when coherent, takes two different tacks in opposing military action in Iraq: (a) the "Buchananite" deterrence argument, and (b) the "Chomskyite" pacifist/humanist argument.
I'll leave the Buchananite argument alone for a second and deal with the humanist/pacifist argument.
The humanist argument wilts before the steely pragmatism of Bush's Iraq policy; there can be no arguing that Saddam Hussein is evil by any estimation, and we have no reason not to believe that Hussein would deploy WMD technologies against the American people if he thought he could get away with it. Here, the left is in a bind. To stop the war, the left must summon something, some greater purpose or cause to counter the collective desire of Americans to be safe within their own country. This is a daunting task, and the only card they have to play is: the moral card.
The left argues that a war on Iraq would cost the lives of American soldiers (although their talk of "thousands of bodybags" coming home to the U.S. is undercut by what we know about the American military's technological prowess), and more importantly to them (as always), thousands of lives of innocent Iraqi civilians.
They believe that America can be "brought to its senses" by pointing out that one Iraqi life is worth exactly one American life (which, broadly speaking, is the standard to which all men should aspire). But this is where hugging a dictator will come back to bite them.
Consider this Amnesty International report from Dec 17, 2002:
Crimes committed under Saddam Hussein's government include, but are not limited to: the gassing of up to 5,000 Kurdish villagers in one chemical weapons attack in Halabja killings and disappearances of Shi`a and other segments of the populations - with victims believed to range between 250,000 and 290,000 over the past two decades, among them at least 100,000 people who are believed to have perished in the Anfal campaign against the Kurds; the use of chemical weapons in the Iran-Iraq War; and crimes incident to the occupation of Kuwait.
If the history of the 20th Century has showed us anything about countries closed up to the ouside world by vicious autocrats, it is that when they open back up we usually find the same things: starving people, lots of weaponry, statues/paintings of the dictator, and...mass graves.
It's hard to hide 300,000+ corpses. I'm sure the Bush Aministration, after a victory, wants the U.S. public to see all kinds of film footage of the seizure and destruction of weaponized anthrax, cultures of botulinum toxin being neutralized by hazmat teams, and so on; good, this stuff should be shown. I'm all for taking out Saddam.
But the anti-war left shouldn't be looking forward to film footage--either the above kind or of the inevitable discovery of Saddam's atrocities. The most devastating film footage for the anti-war left will be the remains of twenty years of a police state. There goes the moral argument, to say the least.
The pro-communist left in this country never recovered from their support of Stalin (except of course, for the New York Times, which covered up the show trials and purges of the 1930's), and it seems like their ideological children are about to make the same mistake. When the human remains start to be unearthed en masse, the left will have to answer the question: "Appeasing Saddam was better than putting an end to this?" Not a comfortable position.
The Buchananite argument is even weaker. Essentially, it rejects the national-security argument (keeping WMD from Saddam's hands) and the softer moral argument (deposing a brutal, homicidal dictator) in favor of doing nothing except minding our own business.
The only comment on the Buchananite arguement is that I've decided to rename it the "Kitty Genovese" argument.
So, in short, there's more out there in the Iraqi desert than just Saddam's WMD. There are the ghosts of appeasement, soon to become the revenants of the appeasers.
Funny how the "Left" in general could give a flying twig about the military, but yet they are now worried about us? ...not likely.
Last time I checked we had an all volunteer army. Soldiers understand what their country asks of them. No one wants to just needlessly die. But some soldiers understand what the price is for freedom, it seems the people who don't understand this seem to be the very ones that don't understand what we stand to lose if we keep heading down this slippery slope of "can't we all just get along" attitude with Islam.
Morons all.............Noam has never dealt in reality......
But, as an optimistic note, no one is beyond redemption...
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