From Milo Bloom at Amish Tech Support, through the Instantman I was pointed to this column in our favorite Arab Rag. I wonder if the e-mail address Fawaz Turki publishes with the column is a new one?
Why should he worry?
One doesn’t become a revisionist in a vacuum. I pore over material from various media sources about the mass graves unearthed all over Iraq, particularly those discovered in uncounted pits in the south, where Saddam had crushed a rebellion there in 1991 with genocidal ferocity, and I turn away in nauseated disbelief. Then there’s the UN Special Rapporteur’s September 2001 report about the execution of 4,000 prisoners at Abu Ghraib’s prison in 1984, and 3,000 others at the Mahjar prison between 1993 and 1998. And you ask how a regime could become so monstrous, so whisked clean of human decency.Will more idealogues from the left hop on this band-wagon?Last Saturday, the Washington Post’s Peter Finn filed a gut-wrenching report about Baghdad’s Kadimiyah High School, where during the 1990s kids were being dragged off for questioning by members of the Mokhabarat for writing boyish anti-Saddam graffiti on their walls, such as “Down with Saddam” — and never returned home. Only now are their families, like other families of the “disappeared” speaking up, asking questions and demanding to know how and why their children were killed and where they are buried. One of the ancillary byproducts of the US invasion of Iraq was the ouster of Saddam and the obliteration, clearly forever, of the totalitarian dungeon that he had turned his country into.
That, in my book, is enough to warrant extending my support for that invasion and for Washington’s projected plans to rebuild the country.
Washington may not succeed in turning Iraq into a “beacon of democracy” but it will succeed, after all is said and done, in turning it into a society of laws and institutions where citizens, along with high-school kids, are protected against arbitrary arrest, incarceration, torture and execution.