Glenn's already noted it, but it's worth broadcasting this far and wide. Here's an insider's view of the "peace" movement and how it made itself an unwitting dupe for one of the most brutal dictators in the last few decades, all for the hatred of Amerikkka.

To be perfectly frank, we were less concerned with the suffering of the Iraqi people than we were in maintaining our moral challenge to U.S. foreign policy. We did not agitate for an end to sanctions for purely humanitarian reasons; it was more important to us to maintain our moral challenge to "violent" U.S. foreign policy, regardless of what happened in Iraq. For example, had we been truly interested in alleviating the suffering in Iraq, we might have considered pushing for an expanded Oil-for-Food program. Nothing could have interested us less. Indeed, we even regarded the paltry amounts of aid that we did bring to Iraq as a logistical hassle. When it suited us, we portrayed ourselves as a humanitarian nongovernmental organization and at other times as a political group lobbying for a policy change. In our attempt to have it both ways, we failed in both of these missions.

We were so preoccupied with our own agenda that we didn't notice or care that the regime made use of us. When critics asked us whether the group was being exploited by the Iraqi regime, we obfuscated, and in so doing put Saddam and his minions on the same level as the U.S. government...

Tonight, I caught a portion of one of the HBO series "Band of Brothers." It was the one in which the troops come across one of the camps (I didn't see the whole thing, so I don't know which it was--I think that it was Dachau).

These men (barely that--most of them were barely out of adolescence) had been through basic training, and were prepared, as well as any human can be without actually experiencing it, for the horrors of war, in which men come at other men either from afar with high-powered weaponry, or up close, with knives and bayonets, or even bare hands and fingernails, in the extreme.

But nothing in their training, even had their trainers anticipated it, could have prepared them for the horrific sights that would greet them as they liberated Germany from the madness that had overtaken that once-civilized nation for the past dozen years.

No lectures, or even films, had they existed, could have rendered them able to deal with the reality of hundreds, thousands of skeletal human beings in striped pajamas, numbers crudely tatooed on their arms to mark them and track them in the system forever--or even just for a few months--which in many cases was the same thing, walking up to them--often staggering, weak from unimaginable hunger--and hugging their deliverers, murmuring, whispering soft yet eternal words of pitiful gratitude in a language that they did not know.

No words of caution could have softened the blow to a farm kid from Iowa, who saw bodies stacked like cordwood, underfed and worked literally to death, or perforated with the few bullets that the monstrous regime had left at the end, eager to destroy as much living evidence as it could before fleeing from the liberators.

The documentary described and showed how the soldiers recruited (at gunpoint, if necessary) the local townspeople to help in cleaning up--moving and burying countless bodies, providing bread to the starving, but also keeping a close watch on them to ensure that they didn't fatally overeat after months of deprivation.

Imagine a middle-aged matron, perhaps the Frau of the mayor, lifting the lifeless body of a nameless, despised Jew, struggling to get it into a hastily dug grave, wondering how she had fallen to such a state. Imagine her muttering, under her breath, "Wir haben es nicht gewusst."

Perhaps they really didn't know.

But in Iraq, they knew.

This may seem like a diversion, but bear with me.

I was brushing a fly away from the kitchen door the other day with my hand. It's a stained, but otherwise unfinished wooden door, and as I flicked at the insect, I brushed it and caught a tiny wooden splinter under a fingernail.

I was instantly shocked at how much pain an almost-unseeable piece of cellulose could cause.

I was grilling some meat on a gas grill a couple days ago, and the meat stuck to the grill. In order to dislodge it, my hand spent a little more time above the heat than I planned, and my sensory system rapidly made me aware of that fact. This was just a momentary overheating of my fragile epidermis--what would a more extended excursion feel like? Boiling in oil, being baked alive in an oven...?

I've lived a very fortunate life. I've never known true pain. I've never broken a bone, or sustained any serious injury other than a sprained finger, and a deep cut on my inner thigh when I was young, which required several stitches and leaves a scar to this day. I've never given birth (and barring some kind of major medical advance, given my gender, never will).

My readers know that I often complain about government grown too large, but I've never feared a knock at the door, never worried about myself or my loved ones being taken away in the night, for no reason, to be imprisoned for years, or tortured, or murdered, or all of the above. I've never feared to speak my mind, and express my opinion of...anything--at least not because I thought it would result in such a knock in the night.

How then, to even begin to imagine living in a place like Saddam Hussein's Iraq?

I think about the sudden sharp and intense pain of that miniscule splinter, and then read about a prison in which all of the fingernails are brutally torn out, along with the toenails, with nothing resembling anaesthesia other than pure terror and shock, and I simply cannot get my mind around the concept of how much suffering and unending agony that would cause. And I'm grateful for that.

I relive that momentary increase in heat on my palm and then try unsuccessfully (which is probably a blessed thing) to envision it continued, not just on my palm, but on my arm, and other arm, and legs, and torso, and head, until the flesh is searing off them, until I am finally, mercifully graced with unconsciousness from the sheer physical insult to my body, but probably not soon enough.

I suspect that the "peace" activists are as unfamiliar with the potential consequences of the depths of human depravity as I, but it seems not to slow them down at all.

I've often been criticized for my satirical comparisons of reportage about WW II and the present war, by those who say Hitler was so much worse--how can I equate him to Saddam? But in what way was he worse?

Hitler never used chemical weapons on his enemies in the field (ignoring the chambers of course, for those Jews, and gypsies and Catholics and faggots, who in his mind deserved it). Yes, yes, he believed that we would retaliate in kind, but there was something more there. He was gassed in the trenches of the Great War--he knew what it was like. Even he, unthinkable though it may be, had his limits. There was an element of humanity there.

There are goals, and there are capabilities. Hitler's goals were odious, as were Saddam's. Hitler's capabilities, relative to the rest of the world in his time, were, given his goals, frightening. But Saddam's goals were no less--he was constrained only by the fact that he ruled a failed Arab state, rather than a vital European one, and that was a flaw that could, and would, have been eventually rectified by purchasing what he needed, given the advancing state of technology and his ability to get around the sanctions, allowing him to use oil money to buy the most destructive weapon that the current world had to offer.

Is this an apology for Hitler? Of course not, and anyone who would interpret my words in that way is of such a low intelligence level as to be not worthy of response. My only point is that it's possible, as bad as he was, to be worse than a Hitler. Hitler believed in something, however monstrous that something was, but Saddam believes (and as I write these words, I hope that the tense of that verb will change soon) in nothing, except raw power, and nihilism.

Yet in their hatred for America, and freedom, there continue to remain those who would embrace him and protect him, even now, after the children's prisons have been opened, after the mass graves have been found, after the endless stories of torture and rape and slaughter start to spill from the lips of those who have been silenced by the unremittant terror for decades. And their crime is even greater than that of those who appeased and supported the ideals of the Nazis, vast though that was.

Because unlike the Germans, the Iraqi people knew. They couldn't avoid knowing. Few of them, even the Ba'athist loyalists, were untouched by the mindless brutality of the regime. Almost everyone had either lost a family member or friend, or seen them savaged beyond the imagining of anyone in a civilized country, or had such an experience themselves. They knew, and even before the liberation, it was possible to learn it from them, albeit at great peril to both those learning and those teaching.

But when one has a juvenile, anti-capitalist, transnational progressive agenda, it's easier to say "wenn ich es nur gewusst hätte" (if only I had known). And I suspect that even now, they still don't want to know.

I'm pretty read up on the Holocaust and all, but I've always labored under the impression that the ovens were there to cremate the bodies killed in gas chambers and elsewise, not that people were put in there alive.

Am I wrong on this?

Not that it would surprise me, of course, but I just don't know.

Yes, the Nazi ovens were to cremate the bodies. But Saddam, by some reports, used them to bake people alive...

Hitler believed in something, however monstrous that something was, but Saddam believes (and as I write these words, I hope that the tense of that verb will change soon) in nothing, except raw power, and nihilism.

I don't see so much difference between Saddam and Hitler in this regard. Saddam does have an ideology, which David Brooks wrote about here. That ideology is in fact a way of dressing up 'raw power and nihilism' but so was Hitler's.

(Re nihilism, note that by the end Hitler was ready to see all the Germans get killed as well.)

Wow, Rand.

Great piece.

Writing beyond criticism, Rand. Thanks for an outstanding essay.

I saw the brilliant episode of Band of Brothers last night too. My throat lumped and my eyes glazed, while thinking the whole time what is expressed in this essay. I find it mind-boggling how people can disagree with our recent actions.

They don't want to know and don't care. Many people who you'd think would know better don't care about anything except "BUSH LIED!" First I was angry. Now I'm nauseated.

I have read reports of pilots flying over Dachau and smelling the place. The Germans in the neighboring towns knew, on some level they might have been in denial, but they knew.

I think it explains there willingness to accept the most foul, unlikely Bush is a NAZI garbage since they hope beyond hope that others might willingly step over the abyss into barbarism as well.

Hitler's government did a lot of research into chemical weapons, so it's not like they had any qualms about their use. In fact, as I went into last fall in my Lagniappe site's series on chemical weapons, they discovered and scaled up production of the first nerve agents.

But they never found themselves in a position where it made any military sense. The Allies didn't have nerve agents (although Germany suspected that we could,)but we did have plenty of good old mustard gas, which was being shipped into the European theater, and we had the capability to deliver it from the air. By the time Germany could have used its new chemical weapons, they knew that the retaliation would have been unbearable. Which is what a deterrent is supposed to do; it worked well.

But had the early nerve gases been available in quantity during, say, the Battle of Britain, there's no telling what might have taken place.

Spot on, Rand. Brilliantly expressed.

I would only quibble with your position that it was Hitler's exposure to gas during WWI that prevented the use of such during WWII. He knew we (the Allies) would have smothered Germany in tons of mustard gas if he had so much as hinted at a gas attack. The point about the Battle of Britain notwithstanding, I don't think he dared. Germany (and possibly much of France and the rest of Western Europe, depending on the timing) would have been a waste land.

Otherwise, fabulous post.

Saddam is/was a ambitious monster. There was a excellent case for eliminating his hateful regime- and I was always pissed off by critters like the Greens who failed to recognize that.

I opposed this war not because it illustrated America's strength, but because diplomatically, militarily and economically this war has tremendously weakened the United States. And while one brutal dictatorship might be broken, a hundred others have been strengthened. Especially the far worse - and infinitely far more dangerous - regime in North Korea.

This was not inevitable - alienating NATO, and the conversion of the best fighting force in the world into frustrated peacekeepers was not inevitable. I wont complain as to how this war was fought, but as to how it was set up.

I have little problem with this administration's ideals (at least so far as foreign policy is concerned). My problem is with its competence. The shots being traded across the Potomac, as the CIA, NSC, Foggy Bottom and the Pentagon toss yellocake at one another are but one symptom of that failing.

A quibble: The alleged children's prision was shown to be an orphanage, admittely for the children of disappeared victims of the regime. Many of the kids "liberated" by the U. S. forces are now child prostitutes on the streets of Baghdad.

Not to downplay Ba'athist maddness, but this one was incorrect.

Duncan. Your link re: the children's prison doesn't work. But if it's the story I'm suspecting (Baghdad Broadcasting Company?), it's been debunked. It was a prison, rather than an orphanage.

Otherwise, why were their parents waiting for them??!

Duncan, it was a prison.

As for "alienating NATO," neither NATO, or the UN, are anything without the US. What the last year has taught us is that these two relics of the Cold War are utterly obsolete. They'll have to be replaced with something else (though NATO may be fixed by simply moving it further east, say, to Prague or Warsaw), but for now, ad hoc alliances will best get us through the war as it continues, and more regimes reform, or die.

Ahhhh....

Goddam New York Times....

this link clarified things for me.
My bad. I use "Musing" as my complete substitute for Insty these days...

NATO represents boots on the ground while the U. S. does other things. It also represents a collection of countries that hold a non-trival fraction of U.S. debt, and deep postcolonial intelligence networks. It is possible, and it is in the United States interest, to keep these guys on board. Just holding the phone and going "uh huh, uh huh" for a while would go a long way to achieving that.

Most of them are on board. NATO, to the degree that it should exist, is being appropriately restructured for a post-Cold War world, in which the dominant enemy ideology is now radical Islam and Arab nationalism.

Re: NATO.
The ones that matter are the ones that can pay their own way. And that matter - France and Germany - are - in a very real sense - the front lines in the war on terror. It was there that the ringleaders of 9/11 were radicalized. It is those immigrant communties that contain the Arab world's most lethal dangerous elements; it is also those communities that represent the Arabs greatest hope for a prosperous, peaceful future. Without access to those communites, you can't win this war.
And to lose that access over a pointless game of pouty-pout, of freedom fries and anti-Americanism that could have been avoided would be disastrous.

The ones that matter are the ones that can pay their own way. And that matter - France and Germany - are - in a very real sense - the front lines in the war on terror.

Yes, on the opposite side, at least in the case of France... I expect them to declare sharia law there (and in Belgium) any day now.

And to lose that access over a pointless game of pouty-pout, of freedom fries and anti-Americanism that could have been avoided would be disastrous.

It was not avoidable. Chirac was determined to protect his pal Saddam (and all of his under-the-table contracts with him) at all costs. And judging by his behavior since, there's no dictator on the face of the earth that he doesn't like. France is not, at this time, a US ally in any useful sense of that word.

"And I suspect that even now, they still don't want to know."

They KNOW; they just don't care.

All that matters to the left/far left is destroying Bush and the Republicans (first) and then Western Civilization itself. But notice how they live in the West; people who have to live in countries such as Iraq (or worse), who these leftist clowns claim to care about, don't protest liberation or progress. Apparently they don't think their "rustic" lives are quite as romantic as the leftist seemd to.

Chirac was determined to protect his pal Saddam (and all of his under-the-table contracts with him) at all costs.

...I presume to make a smirky wisecrack about the Bush family and Saudi Arabia would be countproductive at this point...

Been a good little debate - cheers.

Ack..
that should be "counterproductive"...

No, not at all. I'm not thrilled with the coddling of the House of Saud, and it's an issue on which Bush would be quite vulnerable, if they had half a brain. But they're too busy focusing on one irrelevant line of the State of the Union address.

But unlike Chirac, at least Bush didn't run for president to stay out of jail...

But they're too busy focusing on one irrelevant line of the State of the Union address.

Well, I agree the problem is not the "lie" in that case. I would say again the real issue is that of competence - there was no need for that bit of sloppiness to be in there.

What I want to see is that redacted bit of the 9/11 report, and the 8/6/01 memo - those are the biggies, especially where the Saudis are concerned.

But unlike Chirac, at least Bush didn't run for president to stay out of jail...

Believe me, I have no love for Chirac. I'm a Kiwi - and we have been on the sharp end of his brand of state-sponsored terrorism.

It's been pointed out many times in the blogosphere that one major, but diplomatically unstated reason for invading Iraq is to create a friendly nation-state with which to pressure the Saudis. That's a far cry from France's desire to maximize profits for Total Fina Elf.
So yes, smirky wisecrack would be counterproductive. Otherwise, excellent debating points Duncan! I've been enjoying this entire thread.

The knock on the door does come in the middle of the night in America. For drug users and dealers. Admitedly it is not a death sentence - usually. But people do get killed. Occasionally the wrong people.

The biggest use for SWAT teams is not hostage situations. It is drug raids.

Do we know? Yes. Do we know we know? No. There is the coverup. We turn a blind eye. It's normal.

Quote: "Hitler never used chemical weapons on his enemies in the field (ignoring the chambers of course, for those Jews, and gypsies and Catholics and faggots, who in his mind deserved it). "

Don't forgot the Mentally Handicap that were quarantined and gassed. In order to cleanse society and make a more pure perfect super Aryan race Hitler demanded the round up and elimination of Mentally Handicap people. What was most sickening is that some families willingly handed over their mentally challenged family members to ease the burden.