Conservative View
October 1, 2008
“You and I know and do not believe that life is so dear and peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery.” Ronald Reagan, October 27, 1964.
In September 1939, Nazi Germany invaded Poland. Over the next six years Europe that we knew would be destroyed. Yet, as Hitler’s armies ravaged France, Poland, Russia, and the UK, The United States did very little to aid our allies over the sea. We were isolationists. This is a reoccurring theme for our country and, usually, with good reason. This was a war unlike anyone had ever seen. While our citizens scraped up from the ashes of a massive depression, millions of Jews, Polish, and Slavic people were being systematically exterminated overseas. The Jews call it ‘Shoah’, a Hebrew word connoting catastrophe, calamity, disaster and destruction. We know is as the holocaust.
We all know the end to this story, the triumphant emergence of the world’s two great superpowers, with America eventually mobilizing to save the day. But what if we hadn’t? What if Americans had thrown up their arms and said to ten million Jews ‘We understand how bad things must be for you, but we don’t want to carelessly let our sons go off to war, so to save our own skins we’re willing to make a deal with your slave masters.’ This is what was happening. It took an attack on American soil to force us out of our shells. As soon as the problem had become personal everyone finally shouted out the answer that we knew in our hearts all along. It was, and still is, not an easy answer. Finally, six years after the invasion of Poland, the Shoah ended. This was an entirely preventable event, caused simply by taking the things we have for granted.
This piece of history serves as an invaluable lesson to the present. While our enemy is less apparent, and the line between ‘good’ and ‘evil’ has been blurred. The objective, the fundamentals, and the standard of humanity remain exactly the same. The war in Iraq is not a worthless one. Saddam Hussein put his citizens under living conditions that seem unreal and distant to the typical individual. He has killed thousands of Kurds with nerve agents and other chemicals. Do not believe that just because the Middle East is a different culture, that it is alright for them to be oppressed and slaughtered at the hands of cruel dictators. Our war in Iraq is not lost, nor wasted. Progress is being made, and democracy has been established. Knowing the past allows us as a country and as a global community to attempt to identify threats before they become a global catastrophe. We cannot permit complacency, isolationism, or fear to allow another Shoah, because this time the result might not be as heroic.
Those who oppose this view would have you labeled as war mongers. They would have you believe that this is a war that cannot be won. They would tell you that Iraq is a losing fight, and that it is causing American bankruptcy. This is not the case, this is defeatism. The answer today is a simple one. Not easy, but simple. As former President Reagan put it, “We will preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we will sentence them to take the first step into a thousand years of darkness.”
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Interesting, you do know that Saddam was a product of our foreign policies in the 1980s… right? You know… when we decided to fool around in the middle east, and encourage Saddam to invade Iran. In fact, we gave him the wonderful nerve agents and biological weapons that he used to kill the Kurds, along with everything else he needed to wage war with Iran. Of course we couldn’t hold an isolationist foreign policy during WWII, but the fact is that if we would have not fooled around in the middle east in the 1980s we would not be in the mess that we are in today.
After the Gulf War Saddam never posed a threat to the U.S.A. The idea that Saddam was a threat was created through a mix of 9/11 fear, lies of WMDs, and mass amounts of propaganda.
If the reason for going into Iraq was really to help the Iraqi people, and to halt a potential “Shoah”, why have we not gone into countries like Darfur, and Rwanda to end the genocides there?
I think you have some good points there. How do we decide which countries we need to help and which genocides we leave unhindered?
This is becomes the true issue because although there is justification for interferance in all these events, money, lives, and stability are often deciding factors.
Surely the mass killings of hundreds of thousands of African people can not be seen as less important than a few thousand middle-eastern people.
I think the line was drawn in Iraq for a few other reasons, a large part of which was the hope to begin stabilizing the region surrounding Iraq (Operations in Iran come to mind).
You are correct that much of the instability of the region is due to US influence in the late 80’s-early 90’s when our country was so focused in aiding the middle-east in driving back the Soviets. This is something we are paying the price for now, but it doesn’t mean it can be ignored.
As for the propaganda, this is something that is often reffered to in many liberal news articles, but I have yet so see any myself.
Thank you for the thoughts though, I appreciate you handling your rebuttle in a mature mannor, and I always appreciate a healthy disagreemnt.
Stating that the view of Saddam as a threat to the U.S. was created through mass propaganda was redundant. The mix of 9/11 fear and lies about WMDs was the propaganda, and it worked!
Saddan intentionally restricted access of the U.N weapons inspectors. That alone was enough to raise suspicion. When a totalitarian leader refuses to submit to a search, shouldn’t some red flags pop up?
Iraq let U.N. weapons inspectors in, with no conditions, and allowed them to inspect anything.
You might find this article interesting Dferrari -
http://berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2004/03/18_blix.shtml
Saddam himself though he had weapons of mass destruction, as did about 75% of the Legislative branch. Just sayin…
Teddy, I don’t understand your comment. Could you elaborate on it?
This artical makes explicit is/ought value judgments on other cultures which it has no place to even understand. America’s supposed journey to freedom in Iraq is the result of a neurotic psychological need to be morally superior to foreign nations, in other words when a country (America) assumes binary moral conceptions like good and evil it searches for evil things to prove its own goodness to (namely Iraq). Why should we be worried about what happens in the middle east when America is a wasteland of consumerist culture and neurotic morally bloated citizens? Its the same neo-colonialist attitude which got is into Vietnam and only serves as a distraction to any real internal psychological problems of the nation.
Well said BTianen. I agree with you 100%.