The news today is yesterday’s murders and sadism in Fallujah–that means it’s a good time to think about why we are in Iraq.
You could do no better than reading David Gerlernter’s ‘The Holocaust Shrug‘ in the current Weekly Standard.
‘The war was an unmitigated triumph for humanity,’ writes Gerlernter. ‘Everything we have learned since the end of full-scale fighting has only made it seem more of a triumph.’
Gerlernter’s article notes that Democrats speak mostly of our failure to find WMDs and only ‘grudgingly’ mention Saddam’s crimes; they fail to acknowledge the moral importance of what the Coalition has achieved.
The public seems to be (at least for now, and based on polls) grasping why we went into Iraq and why we must remain there for awhile, probably helped along, to the surprise of those who thought he’d put a nail in Bush’s coffin, by Dick Clarke’s circus. (Talk about “using 9/11!”)
It’s impossible to do justice to a Gerlernter article in a few paragraphs, but I do want to quote his comparison of Hitler and Saddam.
A fastidious thinker, he doesn’t overwork it:
‘[Next] to Hitler, Saddam is a mere child with a boyish love of torture and mass murder.’
But a murderous child we don’t want loose on the world. We’re fighting the vestiges of his regime now.