The anniversary of the invasion of Iraq has arrived, and Saddam's useful idiots -- Lenin's term for Westerners easily duped into supporting those who should be their worst enemies -- remain on the job, still billing themselves as "anti-war protesters". Don't they realise that we've already invaded, Saddam went from palace to spider hole to jail cell, the UN has recognised the Coalition as the legal authority there, and the Iraqi people are free of his misrule at last? Don't they realise that Iraq is well on the way to self-government by the will of the people, instead of the will of a dictator? Or do they simply lack the honesty to call themselves what they really are? One cannot separate the cause from the effect. These people are actually protesting the removal of a brutal dictator and the liberation of twenty-five million Iraqis.
The group that organised the protests, calling itself United for Peace and Justice, is no more than a front for notably freedom-hating factions like the Communist Party USA and other Communist/Socialist groups, as their web site reveals. The "member groups" listed as participating in this UPJ reads like a Who's Who of America's enemies. How can anyone with a conscience join in a protest against a war that freed so many people from tyranny sponsored by anti-American anti-freedom hate groups? The arrogant naivete of Liberals never ceases to amaze me, nor does their willingness to be pawns for those who hate this country and want to see it destroyed.
One of their main objections -- besides the usual simple-minded Bush-hating anti-Americanism -- seems to be that they don't think they were told "the real reason" for the war. They're angry that Saddam's weapons of mass destruction haven't yet been found after a whole year, although we're still finding sunken Nazi U-boats at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico after sixty years. Every intelligence service in the world, as well as the United Nations itself, insisted that Saddam had not only WMD programs, but stockpiles of the weapons themselves. Where are the protest against the "lies" of the UN? Every reason for war was carefully laid out in the Authorisation for Use of Military Force in Iraq, which Congress voted into law in October 2002 (and the protesting dupes obviously didn't bother to read). Among the many reasons for the removal of Saddam, the document mentions WMD programs and the development of WMDs... but not the stockpiles the Left insists was "the reason" for war, except in the context of the UN's findings. For people who revile President Bush as being "simple", Liberals show a remarkable lack of understanding of the Iraq situation's complexities. When the President tried to explain more than one reason for removing Saddam at a time, the Left accused him of changing "the reason" for the war. Don't look for logic or consistency in this crowd. It's all about their hysterical manufactured jumped-up personal hatred of President Bush.
Where were these people in, say, 1865? Were they milling about in front of the White House carrying signs saying "We Were Lied To" and "Lincoln = Satan" in protest of the Civil War? I can just imagine it now. "But the war freed the slaves, isn't that a good thing?" "Well, yes, but it wasn't the reason he told us for war!" These anti-liberation protesters are (usually) quick to agree that Saddam was a bad man, and had to go. Almost all of them will agree that he never would have left power of his own accord. Yet removing him was still somehow a bad thing. As I said, logic is in short supply here.
Try asking these anti-liberationists about their plans for the future of Iraq. Those with the least amount of foresight and critical thought will repeat that we should simply "bring the troops home now". They would be the first people to complain, mark my words, should Iraq fall into the iron grip of another strongman dictator. Some insist that we need "international help" in Iraq, which we already have. They keep missing the fact that the military of thirty-four nations can be found in Iraq, including Japan -- the largest deployment of troops outside their homeland since the end of WWII. Of course, when they say "international", they refer to the United Nations. That's the same UN, by the way, that allowed Saddam Hussein to steal $10.1 billion dollars for himself from the oil-for-food program right under their noses, while only managing to skim a measely $1.2 billion for itself. (Of course, we don't know where the interest generated by the billions of dollars held for the UN in French banks went yet.) It's the same UN that still hasn't been able to provide a workable solution to ethnic violence, riots and protests in Kosovo five years after the end of the war there. If we scoured the Earth, we could hardly find a more corrupt, incompetent organisation. A worse fate for the Iraqi people could hardly be imagined than to turn their future over to the United Nations, but that's what these protesters demand in their self-righteous bluster.
Where were the protesters against Saddam's atrocities? Talk about AWOL... the entire Left was missing somehow when Saddam was running rape rooms, kidnapping people in the middle of the night, filling mass graves, spitting in the face of the entire world, violating every human civil right ever invented, and crushing the spirits of the Iraqis under his totalitarian rule. They didn't care then... why should anyone give a damn what they say now? They act as though they have the moral high ground... but from where I sit, it looks more like the bottom of a moral sewer.
