Radiofree West Hartford - A Just War by David M. Huntwork

A Just War

By David M. Huntwork

August 14, 2003

The justification of the Iraq War should be old news by now but still the shrill cry of "Where's the WMD's?" continues to reverberate across the political landscape. Presidential hopeful Howard Dean threatens to lead the Democratic Party to the brink of political oblivion by attacking the war and advocates the "cut and run" policy if he were to be elected. The rest of the nine democratic lemmings, as well as many in the media, have desperately joined the scramble to disavow the war in spite of the fact that many supported it. While the rest of the nation has moved on, the Democratic Party is preparing to make the Iraq war their major issue in the coming presidential election. It is embarrassing to watch a major political party seek the sissy vote.

In spite of the buried centrifuges, banned missiles, mobile biological weapons labs, the testimonies of defectors and captured officials, captured documents and thousands of gassed Kurds and Iranians moldering in the grave the there are still those who question whether Saddam had Weapons of Mass Destruction in the months and years leading up to the Coalition invasion and the inclination to use such weapons. I suspect that most are really asking whether the destruction of the Baath regime and the ousting of Saddam Hussein was the right thing to do.

It is indisputable that the Iraqi's developed, possessed, used and coveted WMD's , and were planning to develop the nuclear form of them as soon as United Nations sanctions were lifted. As to whether they were an undefinable "imminent" threat is irrelevant and a red herring argument at best. The real question is whether the Iraq War was a just war. Was liberating the Iraqi people the moral and right thing to do and will history regard this as a suitable, just and deserved ending of the despotic Saddam regime?

History has recorded in stark black and white the tyrants and mass murder of the last century. The slaughter of Armenians by the Turks, the insanity of Idi Amin, the apocalyptic terror of Pol Pot, the ethnic orgy of death in Rwanda, the horrific war against Christians in the Sudan, and the countless lives sacrificed by Lenin, Stalin, and Mao on the Red altar of Communism. These are just a few on the list that reads as a nightmarish record of mans' inhumanity to man.

Only rarely do tyrants meet the end that they deserve. The world defeated and destroyed the triple evils of Nazism, fascism and Japanese militarism but only after the organized slaughter of tens of millions had run its course.

Saddam and his sons have served as just the latest Middle Eastern incarnation of such terror, war and death. The thirty years of Baathist rule in Iraq produced wars, invasions, and attacks on three neighboring countries, the direct deaths of over a million people, and ethnic and religious civil wars with the obligatory torture chambers, execution squads, rape rooms, and chemical attacks on civilian populations. The laundry list would not be complete without mentioning the funding, arming and training of terrorist groups of all political and ideological stripes and the attempted assassination of a former president of the United States.

Perhaps the most premeditated diabolical act was what occurred after the imposition of UN sanctions. The Saddam regime embarked upon the deliberate starvation and medical neglect of the Iraqi people for political purposes. Tens of billions of illegal petro dollars funded WMD programs and was hoarded or spent on lavish lifestyles for the elite as the children of Iraq died from neglect, malnutrition, and lack of medicine. All played out for the eager lenses of the world press and the benefit of the pacifists here at home.

In the end it should be a moral outrage that it took this long for a "coalition of the willing" to finally end the reign of yet another of histories monstrosities. When the Iraq War first started what was heard from the average American was not "why are we doing this?" but "what took us so long?" and "we should have taken him out the first time". The blood soaked sand of Iraq deserves better.

The name Saddam will become just another one word term symbolizing the utter cruelty humanity is capable of inflicting on itself. His shadow will always be with us and be remembered for its own particular horrors and the unique terror he brought his victims.

The members of the Axis of Evil, Al-Queda, and their allies have shown no mercy to their victims and should be shown none in return. With a little luck some native Kurd will mete out some true justice and display the head of Saddam on a pole in a village square somewhere. It would certainly simplify the worries of providing a "proper Muslim" burial for a mass murderer and spare the ever so sensitive sensibilities of the Arab street.

Those that bemoan the use of force against the Saddam regime or mourn the killing of the "Hussein boys" share a portion of guilt for the horrific crimes committed by such criminals. To prevent rape, mutilation, torture and the shedding of innocent blood, to civilize a people, to kill a sadist, to liberate a country, to bring peace to a region wracked by war and help heal an ancient land is a cause that is noble and worthy of respect. Civilized and free people have a duty to do what we can to make the world a better, safer and more merciful place. It is certainly reasonable to prevent rogue ideologies and psychotic personalities from unleashing their holocaust of terror and vision of destruction on the rest of us.

When you add it all together; a vicious tyrant, nuclear ambitions, torture, genocide, sponsorship of terror, user of WMD's, combined with a vicious hatred of Israel, America and Western Civilization, there can be no other conclusion than that the Iraq war was a just war. Untold thousand of future Saddam victims have President George Bush and the iron resolve of the American people to thank for their lives. In the course of history few nations have destroyed tyranny instead of imposing it and liberated nations instead of enslaving them. A nation founded in Liberty has given that blessed gift to the Iraqi people.