PEACE OR FREEDOM?:

When did Despotism become Peace? (Sean Peck)

The liberation of the Iraqi people has begun, after the slaughter of 2 Million Iraqis, countless wars and aggression against his neighbors, decades of abject oppression of the most fundamental human rights, untold violations of the Geneva Convention and UN Resolutions, the end of Saddam and his regime of terror is at hand.  US and British forces once again bring liberty to the oppressed. 

One would think after the untold death and oppression of the late 19th and early 20th century the lessons of appeasement would be learned.  One would also think the complete and total failure of communism would also be widely universally accepted.  Fortunately in America largely these lessons have been learned, our troops have had to mop up the messes, including the HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF CORPSES, created by these failed ideologies.  Europe doesn’t care about the clean up their failed policies, because its been a long time since they have had to clean them up, that’s a job they leave for us Yanks.
 
Sadly much of the world has not learned this lesson and it appears that the nations that have learned the least about dealing with despots are the same nations that created the 3 antichrists of Europe.  The nations that unleashed Napoleon, Hitler and Stalin upon the world have been the most vociferous advocates of leaving Saddam and his regime in power. 
 
I guess in a way I can see their side, I mean, why worry about Saddam slaughtering 2 million, after all, their past leaders butchered nearly 200 Million, É. I guess in the face of that, what is a paltry 2 million souls?  What is cutting out the tongue of those who speak against the dictator in the face of the Gulags and Concentration camps?  What is raping a 4 year old girl, or gouging out her eyes, in front of her parents in comparison to this?  What is rounding up those who oppose you and making them disappear in the face of French collaboration with Hitler’s Holocaust?  At least the Iraqis rounding up those souls who will die, are doing so at the orders of another Iraqi, not a German.  What’s to care about Saddam’s desire to control a few desert countries in the middle east?  When your actions have destroyed CONTINENTS.  I guess to the nations who unleashed these horrors upon the world, Saddam is just a want to be.

Had a nice e-mail conversation this week with someone who is going to be talking to a group of third through fifth graders about the war and wondered how to approach it. We decided the best way is to place it in a continuum of American struggles for freedom. Ask the kids about wars they presumably have already heard of--Revolution, Civil War, WWII--and get them to tell you what each was about--liberty, ending slavery, stopping fascism... And then tie this war, for the freedom of the Iraqi people, into those prior fights. Help them see that war for liberty is sometimes preferable to a despotism-ridden peace. Here in NH, you could even remind them that our state's motto is based on John Stark's, and our, preference for one over the other: "Live free or die. Death is not the worst of evils." Posted by Orrin Judd at March 22, 2003 7:39 AM