Wednesday, April 09, 2003

 

Baghdad Falls

It's very good news. Less people will die now.

And now the gloating will begin. Christopher Hitchens got an early start and has already posted a bit about how he was right and the peaceniks were wrong. I won't link to it. There will be plenty more. The White House consigliore who engineered this will be everywhere crowing about how right and courageous they were to liberate the people of Iraq and how dictators everywhere should now be shaking in their boots (except those who are our allies of course).

Quite by accident today I ended up seeing a photo of an Iraqi child, maybe 10 or so. He was a victim of a US bomb. The top half of his head was gone. I couldn't breathe when I saw the picture. My son is just over a year old. It is utterly impossible for me to imagine the pain and grief that boy's family is feeling right now (if they survived) but I guarantee if it were me I would feel nothing but hate for the people who did this. That boy was someone's son. He is now "collateral damage."

The US and UK soldiers who fought this war are sons and daughters too, and mostly young ones at that. They are also innocent of this war. The President ordered them to fight and they did their jobs and I expect they did it with as much humanity as possible. But war is simply not a humane thing. The soldiers who died, and those that will inevitably die during the post-war occupation, didn't deserve it any more than the civilians did. I mourn for them all and wish their parents peace.

To those who supported this war: You are not proved right by this "victory." You were wrong. You were wrong because this was a war of choice. No peaceful option was ever considered, and there were many. Not only to destroy Saddam's weapons but to end his regime. But nothing but war was on the minds of those that have been planning this invasion since the 90's. If I thought they had the capacity for it, I would say they should be ashamed. They won't be. They will be jubilant.

I hope Iraqi people are indeed liberated now, though our actions in Afghanistan give me very little confidence. After all, the Administration is already concerned that Syria and Iran haven't learned their lesson.

We were sold this war on a mountain of lies. Iraq was not an imminent threat and the President knew it. Saddam's weapons could barely reach his neighbor Kuwait, and even they haven't considered him a threat for 12 years. All evidence indicated Iraq had nothing to do with Al Queda and any chemical weapons he had would be a lot easier for terrorists to manufacture in the US than it would be to sneak them in from Iraq. The President knew this too. This was not Rwanda or Kosovo where intervention could stop a genocide. More people were dying due to our ill-conceived sanctions regime. And, the only thing Iraq has to do with September 11th is that now they too have suffered thousands of dead in an unprovoked attack. But the grandest and most grotesque lie of all was when the President said that war was his last option. Nothing else was tried, nothing else ever entered his disastrously narrow mind.

The family of that little boy, and the thousands of others who lost loved ones, do not feel liberated. Those that think we did the right thing, go explain to them why this was worth it. Explain to them that there was no way to free them without bombs.

I hope the troops can come home soon.

posted by Mike 11:02 PM

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