Critics of the Iraq war often seem to not understand this fairly simple point, so I’ll just repeat what Mr. Auster said: the combination of WMD and a deranged tyranny creates a serious threat to our country. Syria and Zimbabwe and Cuba don’t enter into this category, so libertarians and paleos can please stop using them as counterexamples. The president conveniently mentioned the other two states which do in a widely publicized speech: they are Iran and North Korea. For the sake of prudence and peace I hope we manage to deal with those countries short of invasion, but there are no good moral or “legal” obstacles standing in the way of us doing what our national security demands, just as we did and are doing in Iraq.

Looks from the photo like we are popular with Iraq’s little boys. Unfortunately, the big boys in the picture, the ones who can make trouble for us, are glowering.

A country rejoices in its liberation from a monster who has ruled it for 30 years, and how does Mr. Sailer’s characterize this event? “We are popular with Iraq’s little boys.” Mr. Sailer’s dismissive, belittling remark would seem to reveal more about himself than it does about Iraq.

Mr. Sailer was just commenting on that one picture. How about Cardinal Martino’s comment concerning the pictures of Saddam?

The U.S. “could have spared us these pictures,” he said, “this man destroyed, [the military] looking at his teeth as if he were a beast… . Seeing him like this, a man in his tragedy, despite all the heavy blame he bears, I had a sense of compassion for him.”

The Cardinal had previously conveyed the Pope’s opposition to the war, noting that, “It will be a war that will destroy human life. Those people that are suffering already in Iraq, they will be in a really bad situation.” He doesn’t seem to have much to say about the rejoicing of the liberated populace either.

Which perhaps says more about the cardinal, and the Vatican, than it does about Iraq. Mr. Sailer has some noteworthy company.

Apologies for omitting the URL:

http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=36168

Steve Sailer’s contemptuous remark would make the liberation of Iraq seem like nothing more than a game exciting for “little boys,” and ignores the reality of so many people in Iraq who have literally been freed from hell on earth. Here’s a story about a not-so-little boy, an Iraqi man who went into hiding from Hussein’s tortures 22 years ago and emerged reborn last April at the age of 45.

Daniel Pipes writes:

“Jawad Amir Sayyid, 45, of Karada, a town southeast of Baghdad … dwelt for an astonishing 21 years in a cell below his family’s kitchen, entering it on December 2, 1981, and not once emerging from it until April 10, 2003, a day after the toppling of Saddam Hussein’s regime.

“Sayyid disappeared from the world because he had deserted from Saddam’s army and supported dissident views. Fearing execution, he built a concrete one by one-and-a-half meter subterranean room.

“The walls of his self-imposed prison cell were organized with a series of hooks holding such implements as a scythe, a bamboo fan, a mirror, a kettle, a stove, a toothbrush and a clock. A small hole at the top of the cell provided some sunlight. He drew water from a tiny well and had a miniature toilet.

“His mother tended to him during all those years through a trap-door entrance; he kept up with world events by listening closely through headphones to the BBC’s Arabic Service. His first hope of release came right after 9/11, when US President George W. Bush gave a speech declaring that terrorists of the world would be hunted down. ‘The next time my mother brought me food I told her of my conviction that [Saddam Hussein] would not last.’ Sayyid waited only one day after Saddam’s fall to abandon his hiding place….

“Sayyid said of himself to London’s Daily Telegraph, which described his bent and birdlike frame as quivering with excitement, ‘I was a fit young man when I first took refuge. Now I am withered and old. But I feel I have the energy of a young boy once again and there is not a second of the day when I do not taste the fruits of freedom.’…

“[T]o quote Jawad Amir Sayyid back in the spring, soon after he left the crypt: ‘I believe that Allah worked through Mr. Bush to make this happen. If I met Mr. Bush, I would say ‘thank you, thank you, you are a good human, you returned me from the dead.’”

Now look again at Mr. Sailer’s cynical one-liner and consider the moral gulf that divides it from the human reality of the people who have been liberated—and the people who liberated them.

http://www.danielpipes.org/article/1361

I think Mr. Auster is reading too much into Mr. Sailer’s remark. Surely VFR readers are well aware of the latter’s irreverent, even, his detractors might say, facile style.

No one denies that Saddam’s Iraq was a place of ruin and misery; but it is simply asking too much of men that they develop a personal moral bond with people on the other side of the world whom they know only by newspaper accounts and photographs. It is not, by my way of thinking, a strike against Mr. Sailer that he has not come to love Iraqis as neighbors, or that he expresses candidly a certain indifference to people that exist only as abstractions.

Christ’s command, as I recall, was that we love our _neighbors_.

As a regular reader — and rabid fan — of iSteve.com, I know I can say with confidence that Steve, though a war skeptic (as I used to be, so I feel I understand a portion of that side of the debate perfectly), CERTAINLY sees all the GOOD that has come of toppling and now capturing Saddam, exactly as do Mr. Auster and everyone here at “View From the Right” (of which I am an equally rabid fan, I scarcely need add!). Regular readers of Steve’s writing can have no doubt whatsoever but that he sees what Mr. Auster and Daniel Pipes do and is fundamentally ON NO OTHER SIDE THAN THEIRS (the rest being just details, believe it or not). The choice of words in his post above surely was not intended in any way to be dismissive or belittling but was meant, rather, solely to convey a sense of a kind of “heads-up” or “reality check in the midst of celebration” regarding the exact same potential for future difficulty with the Iraqi occupation and with achieving the goal of “winning hearts and minds” over there as we at VFR have often discussed at length. I viewed Steve’s brief words as in effect a contribution to that facet of the discussion, expressed as terse ironic pith consistent with his natural “forum-comment style.”

I’ll take Mr. Cella’s and Unadorned’s defense of Mr. Sailer into consideration. Unadorned even says that Mr. Sailer, though a war opponent, sees the good that has come from toppling Hussein, which is a little hard to believe from Mr. Sailer’s comment.

However, I just want to clarify one thing with Mr. Cella. The issue here is not whether we love the Iraqis as our neighbors; I certainly am not calling on Americans to love Iraqis as our neighbors. The issue is my recognition, in the original entry, of the great good that has been done in releasing those people from that monster, whatever other doubts and criticisms we may have about the war. Mr. Sailer belittled that sentiment, in a way that seemed stunningly obtuse to the human reality of the people who have been liberated.

So, this is not a question of whether we “love” people on the other side of the world. This is a question of whether we acknowledge the evil that has been done to them, and the good that has been done to them. And that acknowledgement, I submit, is not something that needs to be limited by geographic or cultural distance. Indeed, the question of distance is moot in this case, since our armed forces are in that country right now, killing and being killed, for the sake of delivering those people from a palpable evil, a struggle in which our own safety is ultimately involved.