Glenn points out an article by "Simple" Simon Tisdall in the Daily Wanker, in which he whines about the apparent ineffectiveness of the UN in saving Saddam from the Evil Amerikans.

What I found interesting in the article is this statement:

For those who have doubts but remain undecided, a second UN resolution has also assumed a key importance. UN authorisation of force would go a long way towards salving many consciences troubled by the prospect of yet more western violence aimed at the Iraqi people.

This is a common tactic among anti-war types--to state, as though it's a fact, that we are going to war against the Iraqi people, that we "aim violence" against them, when the reality, of course, is that we are going to war against the Iraqi dictator, in support of the Iraqi people. It's a similar lie to the one that they repeated about Afghanistan.

In fact, in a sense, our policy toward Iraq for the past decade of sanctions could be more accurately said to be making war on the people of Iraq--certainly they're the ones who've borne the brunt of the pain of it, not Saddam.

And the further reality is that not only are we not aiming violence at the Iraqi people, but we are taking great pains and expense to aim violence away from the Iraqi people, and we are doing it in order to end the violence that has been visited upon them for many years by their own rulers. That's why we spend billions developing and procuring (and restocking over the past year) the smart weapons that were so effective in Afghanistan in taking out targets with precision while sparing structures and people to either side.

The simple response to such idiotic bloviation as that above is to point out that if our goal was to "aim violence" at the people, we could simply nuke Baghdad, Mosul, Basra, Tekrit, and other Iraqi cities. It would save a lot of money, and would be risk free to our men in arms.

Instead, as Israel did in Jenin, we will put our own men and women at risk in order to strenuously avoid innocent casualties to the Iraqi citizenry, in the process of overthrowing the monsters in human form who have been terrorizing them for decades. Our goal, in fact, is to remove Saddam without a major war at all--letting his own commanders do the job for us.

No nation in the history of the world has taken as much care as the U.S. in avoiding needless innocent casualties in the exercising of its foreign policy, particularly in the past half century, and when someone accuses us instead of wishing to maximize them, it's a vicious calumny.

There are sincere and rational cases to be made as to whether or not we should be removing Saddam from power, but when someone can make a statement like the above, they are either terminally deluded and incapable of simple logic, or a vile liar.

I'll let the reader judge which.

      Terminally deluded

      Incapable of simple logic

      Vile Liar

  X   All of the above

.