Letter From Iraq - Lt.

Letter From Iraq - Lt. Smash responds to a Canadian critic of the war who wrote to him on his blog:

A couple of months ago, I visited a village in southern Iraq.

That is to say, I visited the site of a former village in southern Iraq.

You see, it’s not there anymore. Saddam demolished it in 1991, after some of the inhabitants participated in the Shiite uprising. It was only a few square blocks of concrete buildings, but they had all been leveled, and were overgrown with desert weeds.

In the middle of one of those demolished buildings, I came across a single shoe. It was a very small tennis shoe, such as might be worn by a five-year old boy. It was covered in dust, cracked and faded.

I took a photo of that shoe with my non-digital camera.

The people who live in the nearby town don’t know what happened to the inhabitants of that village—but it’s a fair guess that they probably were buried in unmarked graves, or dumped in the nearby river.

Contrary to [the Canadian critic's] claims, the people of Iraq had been trying to overthrow Saddam for twelve years before we decisively intervened, and had repeatedly requested international assistance. But Chris asserts that no intervention would be valid without the blessing of the United Nations (Kosovo?), ignoring the “serious consequences” clause of Security Council resolution 1441.

All of this is beside the point.

How many more villages had to be destroyed before an intervention was justified? How many women raped? How many families massacred? How many more children had to die?

From the verdant green forests of peaceful British Columbia, it’s easy for [the Canadian critic] to argue that the war violated Iraqi sovereignty, the principle of self-determination, and the UN charter.

But in the grim reality of the Iraqi desert, such arguments ring hollow.

The answer harkens back to my post about the "peace"makers this morning: it's not about people. It's about agendas, and about fulfilling the very letter of feeling good about oneself in the most legalistic sense of the term.

One of the left's favorite aphorisms when proposing costly, intrusive regulations and taxes: "If we can save even one life...

We'll, we've saved more than one life with our liberation of Iraq. We've saved, by a conservative count, thousands already - more than were killed by American action during the liberation, certainly.

But it's only the lives saved by punishing Americans - our achievements, merits, and dreams - that count, apparently. The lives of all those brown, Moslem people must not count.

Posted by Mitch at July 30, 2003 04:49 PM