Saddam II (The American Sequel). Deborah Orin pretends to be indignant that U.S. media would not show gruesome footage of Saddam's atrocities, footage that she walked out on! If she can't take it, why would she want us to? The point she refuses to accept is that Saddam's atrocities were irrelevant to U.S. policy, whereas U.S. abuses are intrinsic to U.S. policy concerns.
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Invading Iraq was NOT sold to the American people as a humanitarian "liberation" but as absolutely necessary to defend the UNITED STATES against an 'imminent threat' from "Weapons of Mass Destruction". We would NOT have spent $100 billion to send 130,000 troops 6,000 miles and more from home into harm's way for any other reason, no matter how gruesomely evil Saddam's regime may have been, any more than we have so much as lifted one little finger to stop the slaughter of millions of black animists and Christians in the southern Sudan or of a million Tutsis in Rwanda.
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Is it good that Saddam was ousted? Yes and, alas, no. Saddam knew Iraq's inclinations to violence and constantly had to suppress intercommunal slaughter with great severity. We are now finding we have to do the same thing. So we have become The New (Improved!) Saddam. We don't like being The New Saddam. So maybe we should have tried to reform the Old Saddam so we wouldn't have to become mass murderers to keep the peace in endlessly violent Iraq. (Responsive to "Reporting for the Enemy", New York Post, June 16, 2004)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 12:09 PM