Terrible Doubt Johann Hari talks
Terrible Doubt
Johann Hari talks sense once again:
Nobody Ð nobody, not the anti-war movement nor Jacques Chirac nor George Galloway Ð was able to adopt a position towards Iraq that wouldn't result directly in the deaths of innocent people. If we had taken the route preferred by the anti-war camp, people would have carried on dying at Saddam's hands for weeks, months, years Ð and then died under his deranged son, Uday, and so on and on, corpse upon corpse...
So nobody who engages with the reality of Saddam's Iraq can take the moral high ground over deaths. Any which way we leaped from here, innocent Iraqis would have died. Giving the pro-war faction evidence of horrible civilian deaths is not a refutation of our case: if the war had not happened, there would be plenty of corpses whose photos we could wave at you (if anyone had cared enough to take those pictures).
Like Hari, and I imagine most who have advocated this war, I have moments of terrible doubt, particularly when considering what might result from the drawn-out, unresolved stalemate predicted with unseemly relish by many of its critics, and simply as a visceral reaction to suffering. But I don't see how you can dispute this logic. It's hard to imagine how anyone, informed of the reality of Saddam's Iraq and truly concerned about Iraqi suffering, could persuade themselves that the course of action which would leave Saddam a free hand to torture and murder at whim was unequivocally the right one. War is a terrible thing, but surely some things are even more terrible. Wars, at least, can come to an end. And many people conveniently forget that enabling the world's leading totalitarian psychopath to remain in power, in essence condemning thousands upon thousands to death and misery and leaving millions with no hope of anything better, would have been "in their name" as well.
Posted by Dr. Frank at April 5, 2003 08:18 AM
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