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Jewish World Review
March 23, 2006
/ 23 Adar, 5766
The humanitarian case for war in Iraq
By
Jeff Jacoby
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http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
"I wondered at first whether the women were exaggerating."
The writer is Pamela Bone, a noted Australian journalist and self-described "left-leaning, feminist, agnostic, environmentalist
internationalist." She is writing about a group of female Iraqi emigrees whom she met in Melbourne in November 2000.
"They told me that in Iraq, the country they had fled, women were beheaded with swords and their heads nailed to the front
doors of their houses, as a lesson to other women. The executed women had been dishonoring their country with their sexual
crimes, and this behavior could not be tolerated, the then-Iraqi leader, Saddam Hussein, had said on national television. More
than 200 women had been executed in this manner in the previous three weeks.... Because the claims seemed so extreme, I
checked Amnesty International's country report.... Some of the women's 'sexual crimes' were having been raped by one of
Saddam's sons. One of the women executed was a doctor who had complained of corruption in the government health
department."
Bone's words appear in an essay she contributed to "A Matter of Principle: Humanitarian Arguments for War in Iraq," a
2005 collection edited by Wellesley College sociologist Thomas Cushman. To read her essay this week, with the war entering
its fourth year, is to be reminded of the abiding moral power of the liberal case for the war. While most of the left was always
opposed to liberating Iraq a subset of its comprehensive opposition to President Bush and all his works a small but
honorable minority never lost sight of the vast humanitarian stakes: Defeating Saddam would mean ending one of the most
unspeakable dictatorships of modern times. Wasn't that a goal anyone with progressive values should embrace?
That was why, "in February 2003, when asked to speak at a rally for peace, I politely declined," Bone writes. "But I added,
less politely, that if there were to be a rally condemning the brutality Saddam Hussein was inflicting on his people . . . I would
be glad to speak at it."
But condemning Saddam's brutality, let alone doing something to end it, was not a priority for most of the left. I remember
asking Ted Kennedy during the run-up to the war why he and others in the antiwar camp seemed to have so little sympathy for
the countless victims of Ba'athist tyranny. Even if they thought an invasion was unwise, couldn't they at least voice some
solidarity with the innocent human beings writhing in Saddam's Iraqi hell? Kennedy replied vehemently that he took a back seat
to no one in his concern for those who suffer under all the world's evil regimes, and demanded to know whether supporters of
war in Iraq also wanted to invade North Korea, Burma, and other human-rights violators.
It was a specious answer. The United States may not be able to stop every homicidal fascist on the planet, but that is hardly
an argument for stopping none of them. If the Bush administration had listened to Kennedy and to the millions like him the
world over who protested and marched raised their voices against invading Iraq, would the world be a better place today?
Leaving Saddam and the Ba'athists in power free to break and butcher their victims, to support international terrorists, to
menace other countries would have emboldened murderous dictators everywhere. The jihadists of Al Qaeda, Hezbollah,
and Hamas, celebrating the latest display of American irresolution, would have been spurred to new atrocities. The Arab world
would have sunk a little deeper into its nightmare of cruelty and fear. And women's heads would still be getting nailed to the
front doors of Iraqi homes.
Three years into the war, with many Americans wondering if it was a mistake and the media coverage endlessly negative,
one voice I miss more than ever is that of Michael Kelly. The first journalist to die while covering the war, Kelly was the editor
of The Atlantic and a columnist for The Washington Post. He had covered the liberation of Kuwait in 1991, and in one of his
last columns, filed from Kuwait City, he reflected on the coming liberation of Iraq: "Tyranny truly is a horror: an immense,
endlessly bloody, endlessly painful, endlessly varied, endless crime against not humanity in the abstract but a lot of humans in
the flesh. It is, as Orwell wrote, a jackboot forever stomping on a human face.
"I understand why some dislike the idea, and fear the ramifications, of America as a liberator. But I do not understand why
they do not see that anything is better than life with your face under the boot. And that any rescue of a people under the boot
(be they Afghan, Kuwaiti, or Iraqi) is something to be desired. Even if the rescue is less than perfectly realized. Even if the
rescuer is a great, overmuscled, bossy, selfish oaf. Or would you, for yourself, choose the boot?"
Every weekday JewishWorldReview.com publishes what many in in the media and Washington consider "must-reading". Sign up for the daily JWR update. It's free. Just click here.
Jeff Jacoby is a Boston Globe columnist. Comment by clicking here.
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© 2006, Boston Globe
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