knobmaker's Journal: Freedom for Iraq

The following was posted in response to someone who saw nobility in the war on Iraq, and irony in the position of anti-war protesters.

Lest you suffer from oversensitivity and think this an ad hominem attack, let me stipulate that I know nothing about you and therefore my remarks pertain only to your argument.

First, you evaluate Saddam by his actions, and I agree with you, except for the spelling:

"Saddam Hussein on a regular basis commits acts that are considered Attrocities."

On the other hand, you evaluate anti-war protesters by, I don't know... telepathy?

"They don't give a damn about the truly poor and downtroden."

Unless you can produce a poll by a respected polling organization, in which 51% of anti-war protesters admit that they don't care about the poor and downtrodden, I'm forced to conclude that you pulled this portion of your argument out of thin air, or perhaps some darker recess.

Furthermore, you apparently can't tell the difference between Hitler and Saddam, a flaw that does not enhance your credibility as a commentator on military history.

Finally, when you say, "attacking Iraq is certainly something Americans can be proud of," you seem to be assuming that "freeing Iraq" is the actual purpose of our adventure there. It's probably a mistake to take what politicians say at face value. I wonder if you believed that "freeing Kuwait" was the purpose of the first Gulf War. Certain inconvenient details intrude on that belief, namely that Kuwait wasn't a free country before Saddam's invasion, nor was it free after the Iraqis were driven out. Kuwait still belongs to the Kuwaiti First Family, and there are no plans to hold meaningful elections.

Your position reminds me tragically of those who believed Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon regarding the purposes of the Vietnam war. I spent a year in Vietnam, and my experience leads me to believe that almost everything the politicians told Americans about that war was a lie. It was certainly a lie that we were defending freedom, because what we were in fact defending was a series of corrupt puppet governments so inept and so despised by the Vietnamese people that they threw down their arms and surrendered to the North practically the instant we left.

If we were really interested in the freedom of Iraqis, we'd have shipped 'em enough guns so they could kill Saddam, and enjoy the benefits of having freed themselves. This would have been a perfectly moral act for the United States. Too late now.

Don't get me wrong. Dubya put us into the fire, right or wrong, and there's no longer any point in protesting the war. We've screwed the pooch, and now the only thing we can do is get on with it and hope the unforeseen consequences don't nail us.

Here's hoping Saddam gets blown to bits early and we win swiftly, with as few casualties as possible.