"Antiwar Shame: Facing Liberation"

And a reiteration of predictions of mine.

A powerful column by Jonah Goldberg at NRO yesterday:

.... Last time, we refused to topple Saddam ourselves — as Major Gurfein himself noted. "We stopped in Kuwait that time," he said. "We were all ready to come up there then, and we never did." Afterwards we told the Shiites of the south to rebel against Saddam, and they did. Then we did nothing as Saddam slaughtered the Shia, forcing some to lie down in the road and be paved over, alive, with asphalt.

There are two immediate lessons to be drawn from this. First, the slaughter, torture, and terror hundreds of thousands — if not millions — of Iraqis faced was the consequence of not war, but the lack of it. If we had toppled Saddam in 1991, we would have improved both the lives of Iraqis and the security of the United States. It was the premature peace that prolonged the suffering. "Peace" was the moral horror these last twelve years. Giving peace a chance for the last twelve years cost more lives and caused more suffering — by a wide margin — than this war is likely to. Giving peace a chance by playing games in the U.N. and by dickering around with "proportionate responses," emboldened and enraged Osama bin Laden and his cadres. Giving peace a chance made it necessary for the United States to shlep its way back to Iraq one more time. Giving peace a chance is what made the people of Safwan hungry and grateful and suspicious of American charity all at once.

The second lesson is even more painful. The alleviation of Iraqi suffering, the liberation of the people of Safwan and of all of Iraq, makes many puke. Some, quite literally. Antiwar protesters in San Francisco organized a "vomit-in" yesterday to show how the war "made them sick." They regurgitated on cue, their bellies full of milk dyed red, on the steps of federal buildings in downtown San Francisco. Meanwhile other, merely metaphorically nauseous protesters snarled traffic and generally made asses of themselves in the name of ensuring that the people of Iraq were never liberated. Similar protests were held all over America and the world by people who can most charitably be described as Saddam's useful idiots....

As you know, Faithful Reader, I have already predicted that the anti-war crowd will not care that the Iraqis have been liberated from horrific repression: they won't care that the Iraqis will have been freed from it, because they don't care that the Iraqis have lived under it. Also, I have already predicted that mainstream media will, eventually, go out of its way to avoid showing to mainstream America that the Iraqis have been freed from brutal tyranny and are happy that the Coalition went to war against the Iraqis' real enemy, Saddam Hussein; MM will, instead, go out of their way to show mainstream America the accidental, unintentional, and otherwise unavoidable death, destruction, and hardship that were wrought by warfare. (Okay. If I haven't already written about that, I should have.) Not that they shouldn't show us the latter; certainly, they should. But they should not emphasize the latter over the former; and that, they will do.

I reiterate these, my predictions. I hope I'll be shown wrong. But I don't think I will be. When the Blogosphere lights up with livid denunciations of MM's active and deliberate attempt to keep the truth from getting through to mainstream America for very long, remember: you heard it here first.

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Sat. 03/22/03 08:56:57 AM
Categorized as Media & Most Notable & Social/Cultural.