Quagmire
“According to Human Rights Watch, during 23 years of Saddam’s rule some 290,000 Iraqis disappeared into the regime’s deadly maw, the majority of these reckoned to be now dead. Rounding this number down by as much as 60,000 to compensate for the ‘thought to be’, that is 230,000. It is 10,000 a year. It is 200 people every week….
…Similarly today, with all those who seem so to relish every new difficulty, every set-back for US forces: what they align themselves with is a future of prolonged hardship and suffering for the Iraqi people, whether via an actual rather than imagined quagmire, a ruinous civil war, or the return (out of either) of some new and ghastly political tyranny; rather than a rapid stabilization and democratization of the country, promising its inhabitants an early prospect of national normalization. That is caring more to have been right than for a decent outcome for the people of this long unfortunate country.
[Conclusion.] Such impulses have displayed themselves very widely across left and liberal opinion in recent months. Why? For some, because what the US government and its allies do, whatever they do, has to be opposed - and opposed however thuggish and benighted the forces which this threatens to put your anti-war critic into close company with. For some, because of an uncontrollable animus towards George Bush and his administration. For some, because of a one-eyed perspective on international legality and its relation to issues of international justice and morality. Whatever the case or the combination, it has produced a calamitous compromise of the core values of socialism, or liberalism or both, on the part of thousands of people who claim attachment to them. You have to go back to the apologias for, and fellow-travelling with, the crimes of Stalinism to find as shameful a moral failure of liberal and left opinion as in the wrong-headed - and too often, in the circumstances, sickeningly smug - opposition to the freeing of the Iraqi people from one of the foulest regimes on the planet.”
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Paul Jackson from the Calgary Sun wrote an excellent column this week at http://canoe.ca/Columnists/jackson.html :
An excerpt:
“Some presidents, such as John F. Kennedy, or even Bill Clinton, take on an aura no matter what they do. Others, including Nixon, Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush are scorned for living exemplary lives and having great vision.
Kennedy, a serial adulterer, just like Clinton, got the U.S. into the Vietnam War in a big way. That war tore America apart. Nixon quickly got the U.S. out of the war. Yet Liberals praise Kennedy and spit at Nixon’s every image.”
It was Bill Clinton who authorized the largest US-backed bombing campaign in Kosovo. The general public tends to have a skewed, short-term memory when it comes to American history.
From a European historical perspective, it was the “left” that didn’t want to interfer with Hitler’s Nazi dictatorship in Germany. It was conservatives at the time — such as a young Margaret Thatcher — who were protesting against of the evils of Hitler’s regime. Europe’s left sat on their hands as Hitler steamrolled across the continent — and it took clear-thinking individuals to go in there and depose the monster.
On another note, Bush is now getting flack over not doing enough to prevent September 11th. The people criticizing Bush over 9-11, are the same people screaming that Hussein and Taliban regimes should have been allowed to continue. Evan Coyne Maloney has an excellent commentary on the subject at http://www.brain-terminal.com/articles/politics/sit-down-stand-up.html .