Because it is Right – Part II
Even if one concedes every single mistake charged in planning and operations in Iraq – which we do not – the question remains. If you do the right thing for the wrong reason, it is still right? What if you do it by accident or do it late? Does it still count?
Even if one concedes every single mistake charged in planning and operations in Iraq – which we do not – the question remains. If you do the right thing for the wrong reason, it is still right? What if you do it by accident or do it late? Does it still count?
We didn’t go to war in 1941 for the Jews; the liberation of Auschwitz was not our goal. Our government knew what the Nazis were doing but, despite what it knew, the Roosevelt administration elected not to bomb the rail lines carrying Jews to the death camps (making one wonder why the Democratic lever appears epoxied onto Jewish hands even into the 21st Century). Only when allied forces arrived at Auschwitz and elsewhere in Hell, did they find and liberate the remnant.
We said, “Never again,” meaning that never again would those with the ability to stop it stand by while mass graves were filled with those who couldn’t fight back. Bosnia and Kosovo were penance for our knowing failures in Rwanda and Cambodia.
Still, we didn’t go to war in Iraq in 2003 to stop the mass murder, the rape, the torture, and the premature deaths of Iraqi children suffering under UN sanctions while Saddam used their money to bribe the French, the Russians and the UN Secretariat. We didn’t go to war for Saddam’s victims.
We went because the 12-year sanctions regime was crumbling and Saddam still had illicit weapons and an illicit program. We went because we learned what Israel already knew – waiting for terrorists to strike and then retaliating is a recipe for continued and ever more terrible terrorist strikes. We went because September 11th made it impossible for the United States to ignore the grave and gathering threat posed by the nexus between state sponsors and terrorist organizations; the fight had to be taken to the enemy. We went because we believed that there were weapons of mass destruction and we weren’t going to wait until they were used.
But we found Saddam’s victims, living and dead. There are mass graves in Iraq; U.S.and British estimates are that they contain more than 400,000 bodies – men, women and children still clutching toys. Some are the victims of the 1991 reprisals for the aborted Shiite uprisings in the south; some are very recent. [See Saddam’s ‘Killing Field’ 10-17-04 by Greg Palkot for Fox News.]
That alone erases the “wrong war, wrong place, wrong time” argument. What would have been the right time to stop Saddam from filling even more graves? We, as Americans and as Jews, cannot say that stopping a mass murderer is wrong; at whatever time we do it – even if we do it too late for some.
The allied soldiers of WWII were heroes and liberators for the remnant of European Jewry they saved, and the witnesses for the dead. Our own mentor, the late Henry M. Jackson, was a liberator and it framed his world-view. The allied soldiers of the Iraq war are the heroes and liberators of the Iraqi people. And it was right.