BRING BACK THE KILLING FIELDS, JUST DON'T BLAME ME:

Monsters Of The Moment: From Saddam to Osama, America Creates Its Own Nightmares (Sydney Schanberg, March 12 - 18, 2003, Village Voice)

As for the instant question of Iraq, what would be so wrong if, instead of the all-out smash-and-destroy war the president and his people have planned, the U.S. and Britain simply began to ratchet up the small, quiet war that has been going on for quite a while. The air patrols in the northern and southern no-fly zones could be gradually enlarged until all of Iraq was blanketed with overhead surveillance that could spot and, when necessary, knock out clearly identified weapons installations. Economic sanctions could be tightened as well, with stiffer penalties against those selling contraband to Saddam Hussein.

True, this would not bring about a change of regime as swiftly as a blitzkrieg, but over time it would loosen Hussein's grip on power and make change possible.

Several factors recommend this path. For one, some if not most of the nations opposed to the present Bush war plan would have a difficult time rejecting a more modulated, commonsense approach, using techniques already in place. And the damage to Washington's relationship with old allies would be softened.

There would also be significantly less destruction of Iraq's extensive road system, bridges, and other infrastructure, making much easier any nation-building effort to follow.

Finally—and not least—a lot fewer human beings would be killed, including Americans.

Something to think about.

We spared you the earlier part of the story, where this former apologist for the North Vietnamese and Khmer Rouge--here, for instance, is what he wrote just before Cambodia fell to the Khmer Rouge: for the "...ordinary people of Indochina...it is difficult to imagine how their lives could be anything but better with the Americans gone."--but this section of his essay is astonishing in either its naivete, its cynicism, or both. So long as Saddam doesn't decide to use WMD on his own people and his armed forces don't decide to follow him into Baghdad Gotterdammerung, it's hard to see more than a few thousand Iraqi civilian casualties. It would be better if there were none, and it will be we Americans who kill them, but so be it.

Meanwhile, the plan Mr. Schanberg proposes, while it may involve less actual killing of Iraqis by Americans (though that's not clear, given his willingness to bomb "weapons installations), would surely result in tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands of deaths as we essentially tried starving Saddam out of power. What kind of moral derangement is it that leads the Left to countenance millions of deaths so long as they can claim not to have been the killers themselves, rather than accept the responsibility for the few thousand killings that would free a nation and allow us to save hundreds of thousands? How can someone be so shallowly selfish that they'd trade the deaths of others for a "clean conscience" for themself?

Posted by Orrin Judd at March 13, 2003 8:23 AM