\n| \n It’s getting hard to remember a time before blogging, but at the
\n time of the US invasion of Iraq the Dowbrigade did not exist. However,
\n some recent readers may be surprised to find that in the run-up to
\n and immediate aftermath of the military phase of the war, we were in
\n favor of going in. Like John Kerry, even knowing what we now know,
\n we would be in favor of going in. In fact, we NEVER believed the
\n flimsy, transparent rantings and rationalizations of the Bushies. We
\n had reasons of our own for wanting to take the bastard out. Let us
\n explain.<\/p>\n Saddam Hussein had by then passed over the line and entered a category
\n of human being we refer to as Very Bad Men. VBM’s are people the planet
\n would quite simply be better off without. They are people who, had we
\n the power to do so, would cease to live. Different people gain that designation
\n for different reasons; as a lifelong opponent of capital punishment, we
\n do not give it our lightly.<\/p>\n But there are cases of people so inherently evil, involved in enterprises
\n which would result in the deaths of scores of other, innocent lives, that
\n killing them would be an act of heroism. The classic case is that of
\n Adolf Hitler. If you found yourself alone in a room with Adolf Hitler
\n just before the invasion of Poland set off WWII, and there was a loaded
\n gun on the table between you, closer to you than to him, would you pick
\n it up and kill Hitler? <\/p>\n It would certainly be a different situation if you knew that Hitler
\n had a tiny bomb planted in his brain, and you could kill him by pressing
\n a button, without any danger of getting caught and executed yourself.<\/p>\n How we wrestled with these chestnuts as an adolescent groping towards
\n an understanding of himself and what he was capable of. Could we do it?
\n In the ultimate analysis, no one can answer that question until they find
\n themselves in a life or death situation. One of the candidates for President
\n this year knows the answer to that question, and knows the price a man
\n must pay to take the life of another with his own hands.<\/p>\n George Bush is a killer in his own way, to be sure, but his way is of
\n the push-the-button-and-blow-up-the-brain variety. He has sent hundreds
\n of thousands to do the killing, and over a thousand to die. We would
\n truly prefer that the person making these decisions be someone who understood
\n what they entail.<\/p>\n Back to Saddam. What did he do be included in our personal Eliminate
\n On Sight list? You may remember that at that time,immediately prior to
\n our invasion of Iraq, an unprecedented wave of Palestinian suicide bombers
\n were attacking Israel at a pace of several a week. Pizzerias, Supermarkets,
\n discotheques, bus stops were going up right and left. A sixteen-year-old
\n high school student blew herself up next to another sixteen-year-old high
\n school student. Children were killing children.<\/p>\n And Saddam was offering cash payouts, $50,000 or thereabouts, to the
\n families of these children, to encourage them and assure them that their
\n family would be taken care of. What idealistic teenager watching
\n his or her family suffer would not consider a "heroic" free pass to heaven,
\n especially if it included material salvation for the loved ones left
\n behind.<\/p>\n We became convinced that Saddam’s payments were directly causing the
\n deaths of dozens of Israelis and Palestinians. It was pure evil. At that
\n point, we would have supported any effort to remove him from power, including
\n invading Iraq for the express purpose of doing so.<\/p>\n Invading Iraq has not proven to be the problem. It is the kind of job
\n our armed forces is trained to do We did the job in six weeks, destroyed
\n the Hussein family, erased Iraq’s capacity to threaten her neighbors,
\n and ascertained that there were no WMD’s lying around for terrorists to
\n get their hands on. Only 256 US soldiers died during this phase, and we
\n are convinced their actions saved many more lives than that.<\/p>\n What are armed forces are NOT prepared to do, by neither training nor
\n temperament, is to occupy and control a country twice the size of Idaho
\n and 25 million fiercely nationalistic people for an extended period of
\n time. The best of our youth, our most precious resource for the future,
\n are sitting ducks in a shooting gallery, as real killers and crackpots
\n are flocking in from around the world to step up and take their chances
\n at the "Kill An American Carnival Sweepstakes".<\/p>\n Are we, perhaps, using this as a sly tactic to lure out all of the closet
\n American-haters in the world, and get them all into one place, just to
\n make it easier to wipe them out? Nice theory, but in reality every one
\n we eliminate engenders two or three more – widows, kids, brothers bent
\n on revenge in a never-ending cycle of violence.<\/p>\n So what should we have done then, you ask. Pack up our toys, er, advanced
\n weapons systems, and go home. Well, yes. With the clear understanding
\n that if at any point in the future we became convinced that Iraq again
\n presented a clear and direct threat to the Untied States or our national
\n security, we would without hesitation do it again. <\/p>\n Our guys could have come home feeling good about accomplishing their
\n mission. We would get better and better at these finite and precise surgical
\n missions, accomplishing them at less cost and with less loss of life.
\n Antagonistic foreign leaders would learn to respect us, and fear us.
\n But we must avoid, at all costs, this business of occupying a foreign
\n country, or propping up an unpopular puppet regime. It is an ugly business,
\n unAmerican and doomed to failure.<\/p>\n As a final point, a secondary reason we were in favor of excising Saddam
\n did<\/em> have to do with the great unspoken but overriding presence
\n bubbling up from beneath the whole affair – oil. Maybe, we thought, with
\n the Iraqi oil online, we could stand up to that other group of despicable
\n Very Bad Men – the Saudi royal family. In addition to providing virtually
\n all of the human and financial resources for 9\/11, they were on our shit
\n list mostly for the way they treated the women unfortunate enough to be
\n born within the reach of their fanatical edicts. It galls us on a daily
\n basis to have to kowtow to these smug reactionaries who are opposed to
\n everything America is supposed to stand for.<\/p>\nMaybe they shouldn’t be put on the Eliminate on Sight list, but at the
\n very least they should be stripped of power and forced to return the
\n billions they have stolen from the legitimate asperations of the people
\n they rule.<\/p>\n But that is a story for another day. Suffice it to say that support
\n for the initial Invasion of Iraq in no way divests one of the right to
\n criticize how the war was handled or what it has become.<\/p>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It’s getting hard to remember a time before blogging, but at the time of the US invasion of Iraq the Dowbrigade did not exist. However, some recent readers may be surprised to find that in the run-up to and immediate … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":299,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1443],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2567","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-esl-links"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2567","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/299"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2567"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2567\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2567"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2567"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2567"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}} |