The statue of Saddam Hussein topples in Baghdad's
Firdos Square on April 9, 2003. (Public domain image
courtesy of United States Department of Defense.)
Although polite conversation now dictates that deference to the left on the issue of whether the War in Iraq was justified is obligatory. Drowned out by Pavlovian slogan-chanting of “Bush Lied: They Died,” and the reality that President George W. Bush’s post-invasion strategy was a mitigated disaster, proponents of the war have retreated in apparent shame. They should remind themselves of the horrors that were abated by the Allied invasion, hold their heads high, and remind the mob of the good that our presence there accomplished.
Conservatives and Republicans who silently support the war effort owe a large debt of ingratitude to the dismal communication skills of President Bush and others in his administration. Furthermore, internecine squabbles over fine points in US military strategy diffused what should have been a unified response to claims that the war was illegitimate. When US officials should have been taking the lead in publicizing the atrocities of Saddam Hussein and his barbarous regime, and making the case to the world for why America’s involvement in the reason was just, they were deflecting charges of war crimes for abuses to prisoners at Abu Ghraib.
All of these missteps and blunders were the source of the submergence of American prestige around the world, but the errors in managing public relations can not erase reality of why we should have been involved in Iraq, even before the threat of weapons of mass destruction surfaced within the global intelligence community. (Yes, it was almost universally agreed that Iraq had a program underway, and might be stockpiling biological and chemical weapons.) It was Hussein’s own reign of terror that were the only casus belli required, even by standards of international law; acts of genocidal and monstrous evil on a scale much larger even than the Serbian massacring of Kosovar Albanians that had prompted the Clinton administration to unleash the dogs of war on downtown Belgrade and the Serbian military in 1999.
The truth is that the reason Bush, in his retirement, can be the keeper of his own legacy is that, despite his humility in not crying it from the rooftops, he knows the truth about our cause in Iraq. Were he the sort of grandstanding politician he will be historically bookended by, Bush would have greenlighted the co-opting of his opposition’s favorite slogan to proclaim that “American Lives Helped Iraqis Survive.”
The reason that American lives have been laid down for a just cause in Iraq is made clear in a gut-wrenching dispatch by Jerry Weinberger, a professor of political science at Michigan State University, in his third installment of an “Iraq Journal.” Weinberger wrote recently about his visit to the “Red Museum” in Sulaimani, a town in the Kurdish north. The account is a vivid telling of photographic evidence and artifacts of the brutal and genocidal campaign of the Hussein regime, acts of atrocity that were committed in the very building in which the museum is situated.
Here is a relatively mild excerpt from the article:
From the photo rooms, the museum’s guide, Khalil Ali Mustafa, takes visitors to the rooms where the real business of the prison went on. They’re surprisingly small: two 20-by-12-foot cells, on either side of a short hall leading to two toilets, together housed up to 120 prisoners on an average day. From the cells, the prisoners could see, down another short hall, the “relaxation post,” where prisoners fresh from torture were tied to a wall and kicked, pummeled, and insulted by the guards who walked by.
My own memories of a visit to the sole Nazi concentration camp built on French soil during World War II are still vivid and haunting, but pale in comparison to the anguish felt when reading other passages describing crimes against humanity committed by Hussein’s barbarous followers.
Protecting the innocent from the wicked is never a worthless enterprise. When the left continues chanting that weapons of mass destruction was a false pretense for war, push such things aside to get to the heart of the matter. In order to show the world that there is a way that values the lives of individuals, sometimes we must wage war against tyrants for the simple fact that no one else will.
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