Saddam
Hussein as captured during a lightning raid that apparently caught him quite
unawares last night. CNN has a story on it
here. This is good news on many levels. For one thing, as there is
likely to be a trial for his war crimes, there will finally be more attention
given to the horrors committed by this man and his regime. Opponents to
the war in Iraq have been amazingly silent on all the evidence of mass murders
committed by Saddam. The one that chilled me to the bone was a mass grave
in which a little girl was found still clutching a doll -- she was buried alive.
Saddam has been defiant about this already and responded, "They were
thieves." Yea, all those women and children stealing...something..." There
will be plenty of shame to go around to those journalists, protesters, and
others who turned a blind eye to the horrors perpetuated by Saddam against
innocents. A blind eye so that they could focus their ire on Bush.
No doubt the fixation on Weapons of Mass Destruction, one of many reasons
given for the toppling of Saddam, will still get plenty of coverage. But I
seem to recall little outrage over Kosovo when it turned out there was zero
evidence of "ethnic" cleansing. A couple of mass graves with a few hundred young
men in them was about the extent of "genocide" in Kosovo. Were there
street demonstrations in Europe and the United States over bombing civilians in
Serbia over this? Nope.
Which makes one wonder -- do the people who are against the war in Iraq
simply blinded by their hatred of Bush or are they racist? Racist in the sense
that the mass deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocents by Saddam's regime
isn't that big of a deal because they're not white? After all, most of the
anti-war people also propose turning everything over to the UN. The same UN that
stood by and watched hundreds of thousands of people slaughtered in Rwanda. Of
course, those people weren't white. You see the pattern here? There's really
only two likely scenarios: Either these people don't really think killing of
non-white people is a big deal or they hate George W. Bush so much that it's
clouding their rational thinking. I tend to think it's a bit of both.
The capture of Saddam will bring to light the horrors of Saddam's Iraq. It
will be incredibly difficult to sweep the atrocities under the rug (like
Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have done with their selective
recount of war crimes). People around the world will finally have to come to
grips that the United States did the right thing when it liberated Iraq from one
of the most brutal monsters in history. Certainly not the primary
objective for US forces but one that cannot be denied nonetheless.