MEANS AND OBLIGATIONS:

Iraq & President Bush: On behalf of the dead (Olavo de Carvalho, 23 February 2004 , BrookesNews.Com)

In the last days of the war...when the clandestine cemeteries in Iraqi prisons were opened and the corpses started to be counted, I could not avoid noticing — and writing — that the decision taken by George W. Bush had been morally correct and even obligatory: any country that kills 300 thousand political prisoners must be invaded and immediately subdued, even if it does not constitute any danger to neighboring nations or to the supposed “international order”.

National sovereignties must be respected, but not beyond the point where they arrogate to themselves the right to genocide. I wrote it back then and I repeat it: each procrastination by the UN cost, in average, the death of 30 Iraqis a day, more than 20 thousand during the two years of pacifistic babble.

Considering that period alone, the number of those killed amounts to five times more than the total victims of the war. For having stanched this flow of innocent blood — with a reduced number of casualties in both sides, and with the smallest rate of civil casualties than any war of the XX century — the American president, whatever mistakes he may have made, deserves the gratitude and respect of all conscious humankind.

The intrinsic moral correction of the American action is so evident and undeniable that every discussion that followed, in the international and Brazilian media, had to systematically eschew this aspect of the question, so that public attention could be focused at the problem of knowing whether Saddam Hussein did or did not have weapons of mass destruction, and therefore whether George W. Bush was right or not by invoking that reason in particular, among many others.

Now, a government that kills 300 thousand of its subjects does not need to have high-tech means of mass destruction, because with rudimentary means it has already started the mass destruction in its own territory, and it must be stopped at once by whoever has the means of doing so. The US had the means and did the right thing. The UN had the means and didn’t do anything. Between the two, who is the criminal?

One of those arguments that seems so obvious after you read it--of course Saddam was himself a WMD.

Posted by Orrin Judd at March 9, 2004 11:53 AM