CodePink should be named CodeVile
War protestors outside Walter Reed Hospital, where injured troops are currently recovering from battle injuries, are engaging in gross, bizarre, and tawdry demonstrations to illustrate their ignorance concerning our nation’s current struggle.
As CNSNews.com reports, over the Easter weekend one protestor wore bunny ears, a shirt with a skull and crossbones on it, and hula-hooped in a “creepy” anti-war display. Pro-troop demonstrators were horrified by this silly but disgusting behavior that was fully visible to our wounded soldiers and their visiting family and friends.
It is the height of not only boorishness but contemptible and depraved thoughtlessness to protest the injured soldiers of a war rather than those who make the policy to go to war. But considering the ignorance of those who oppose toppling a monstrous dictator who murdered millions of his own people I guess we should not be surprised. Disgusted, outraged, and revolted- but not surprised.
April 13th, 2007 at 9:07 am
Although I don’t agree with protesting outside a hospital where injured troops are recovering, I do think people should be allowed to vent their anger at this illegal war without being ridiculed by you or CBS for that matter.
Please don’t kid yourself that America went to war because it felt pity for the Iraqi public, it was for oil, plain and simple. Saddam was in power and a dictator long before this invasion took place, how do you explain that?
April 13th, 2007 at 9:18 am
So they have free speech to protest but I don’t have free speech to explain why I feel they are wrong to protest? Anyway, I’m still waiting to see cheaper prices at the pump for all this oil we’re supposed to have. But here is a column I wrote a few weeks ago- it is the first of three, but it should answer all your questions concerning the reasons for how I view the situation.
Liberty or Death?
The case for finishing the job in Iraq
By Jeff O’Bryant
I sadly cannot state with any firm conviction that modern school children know of Patrick Henry’s famous demand “give me liberty or give me death.” But my own generation and those that came before certainly should. The question is, is Henry right? Is death preferable to living without liberty? Put another way; is freedom for yourself and/or your fellow man worth fighting for and risking your life?
In a word, yes. I would be negligent, however, if I did not point out that the American colonists were certainly not subject to gross or even serious mistreatment by Great Britain. The initial taxes which were a leading cause of the Revolutionary War were themselves a direct result of the expenses incurred by the British during the French and Indian War. Should not the colonists, who were not only defended by the British during the war but ultimately benefited from their victory, be expected to bear some of the expense? True, these taxes were levied on the colonists by Parliament without representation; but one could hardly call this true mistreatment. In Great Britain’s successive attempts to assert its authority, however, many colonists considered it just that and were willing to go to war over the matter.
Saddam-era Iraq, however, is a severe and unquestionable example of suppressed liberty. Taxation without representation was the least of the Iraqis concerns, as the examples below will illustrate. Of course, the following are just a few snippets of what the Iraqis suffered; quotes from news sources or personal accounts that reveal the worst horrors that can occur in the absence of liberty. It is by no means complete. Rather, it is a mere drop in an ocean of blood that flowed in Saddam’s Iraq and why the United States had not only the right but the moral obligation to intervene.
The horrors of Iraq
“Pictures of dead Iraqis, with their necks slashed, their eyes gouged out and their genitals blackened, fill a bookshelf. Jail cells, with dried blood on the floor and rusted shackles bolted to the walls, line the corridors. And the screams of what could be imprisoned men in an underground detention center echo through air shafts and sewer pipes.” Jack Kelley, USA Today
“Between the men’s and women’s cells was a long mesh cage. Hamed said here, jailers pressed prisoners against the mesh and squeezed hot irons against their backs or threw scalding water on them in front of other inmates.” CBS News report
“To call all this a chamber of horrors is a cliché - and this place is beyond cliché. The hundreds or thousands that died here and were given no trial, no voice, cry out.” Bill Neely, BBC News
“Since the Saddam Hussein regime was overthrown in May, 270 mass graves have been reported. / Some graves hold a few dozen bodies—their arms lashed together and the bullet holes in the backs of skulls testimony to their execution. Other graves go on for hundreds of meters, densely packed with thousands of bodies.” From USAID.gov
“They took my clothes off, laid me down on my back and dragged me by my legs across hot pavement until my back was a bloody mess. Then they made me roll in the sand. And just to make sure that the wounds got infected, I had to climb a 15-foot ladder and jump repeatedly into a pit of sewage water filled with blood and who knows what else. All because I wanted to stop playing soccer.” Haydar, Iraqi soccer player, as reported in the Miami Herald
“We’ve already discovered just so far the remains of 400,000 people in mass graves,” Tony Blair, Prime Minister of Great Britain.
“I have seen interrogators break the heads of men with baseball bats, pour salt into wounds and rape wives in front of their husbands.” Ali Iyad Kareen (a former Iraqi soldier) as reported in USA Today by Jack Kelley.
“One of the president’s bodyguards brought 30 prisoners out - they were Kurds. The president himself shot them one after another with a Browning pistol. Another 30 prisoners were brought and the process was repeated. Saddam was laughing and obviously enjoying himself. There was blood everywhere.’” BBC News report
“Rows of white bundles containing the bones filled room after room. Families filed by, searching for signs of those who had disappeared, some stolen during the night, others taken in daylight. Even small children were not spared the butchery.” Andrew Natsios, Administrator, U.S. Agency for International Development
“These men were beaten with steel rods, had electrodes placed on their genitals, were hung from their arms until their shoulders were dislocated, were suspended by their ankles over the stone floor of a cell while their torturers whipped them with electric cables and pulverized their knuckles with wooden clubs.” As reported in Newsday
“There is an embarrassment of evidence here” against Saddam, said Barbara Comstock, a former Justice Department spokeswoman, adding that human rights groups around the world have documented the atrocities. “Saddam Hussein himself has left a trail, through videos, through pictures, of his atrocities.” Liza Porteus, Fox News
And finally:
I was not told the truth about Saddam. His portraits were all over the house. My parents told me he was a great man, a man who all Iraqis loved. They were scared to tell me how they really felt – how they despised him, how their hatred of him was so deep that my mother even now cannot bear to see his face on TV. But why were they so scared? I was only a child at the time. What harm could I possibly cause them if I knew the truth?
One day, in my nursery school, Saddam paid us a surprise visit, his moustachioed entourage surrounding him like flies around faeces. He sat and beckoned one child to him at a time. It was my turn now. I walked over. He sat me on his knee and gave me a present. He asked me if I liked him. I said, “of course, I love you, you are the great leader”. He then asked me what my parents thought of him, and I told him, “they love you too, they praise you whenever you appear on TV, and we have pictures of you all over the house”. Next came my friend’s turn, with the same procedure. He sat on Saddam’s lap, and was asked, “what do your parents do when I appear on TV?”, and my friend said, “my father spits on the TV”.
I never saw my friend again. He was taken home, and the next day, along with his family and all his relatives, he disappeared. Raeid Jewad, born in Iraq in 1977
Excuses won’t fly
No justification is sufficient to allow the above outlined barbarity to continue. Many cry that there are other trouble spots in the world. Do you disparage those that feed some of the worlds hungry when they cannot feed them all? Do you criticize a family that adopts one child when they cannot adopt all orphans? Do you berate a doctor who saves some lives when he cannot save them all?
Many cry we have no business in Iraq and that we should not have invaded a “sovereign” nation. Is the suffering of others not everyone’s business? Are crimes against humanity not horrors that the rest of humanity has a responsibility to end? Do we have a duty to a political construct (that “sovereign” nation) and no duty whatsoever to the children, mothers, fathers, and whole families who vanish into the mass graves created by that “sovereign” nation?
Many cry that we’ve made new enemies because of the Iraqi War. When did you cease to be on the side of right when your enemies treat women as property, teach children fear and hate, and squeeze the life from their people through the bloody grasp of despotism? Such people should be our enemies. If such people are not our enemies then we need to take a hard look at who we are and what went wrong in our hearts.
Many cry that we should abandon Iraq because “Bush lied, people died.” If Bush did knowingly lie, then punish him and not the Iraqis. Bush aside; in light of the facts can you doubt that our mission itself is the right course? Is what Iraq suffered insufficient to stir us into action? And if you judge it so, are we cowards or just cruelly indifferent to the suffering of others?
Many cry that we should have allowed the UN to handle the situation. Beyond the undeniable fact that they failed not only to do anything to curb Saddam’s butchery but on all fronts concerning Iraq, just how much longer should we have allowed sanctions, futilely targeted at Saddam, to continue to punish and starve Iraqi civilians?
Many cry that we found no WMD’s. In the conventional sense, this is true. But it ignores the larger picture: Saddam himself was a WMD. You laugh at this suggestion? Then consider this: though his true body count is unknown, we are certain that it at least exceeds twice the death toll of the atomic bomb attacks on both Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Again, that’s twice the death toll of both atom bombs.
Many cry that Abu Ghraib prison proves Americans are no better than Saddam. While the abuses are completely inexcusable, investigations were already eleven months underway when the public became aware of the scandal. Participants were punished (though not harshly enough) and I hardly need point out that no such recourse existed under Saddam. Further, reports of the number of prisoner deaths at Abu Ghraib due to abuse conflicts. It seems to be either one or three died as a direct result of abuse or interrogation. That is still one or three too many and the guilty parties should be prosecuted to the fullest possible extent of the law. But for anyone to suggest that conditions were the same after Saddam as before the war portrays a gross misunderstanding of both situations.
Many cry that America itself put Saddam in power. To our eternal shame, we did, and we sent him billions of dollars in aid money. Uproar and protest come now when we are correcting that mistake instead of allowing it to continue?
Many cry that there was no link between Saddam and terrorism and that the war in Iraq is a diversion from the real conflict. According to an American Thinker article by Ray Robinson, Has the Global Islamic Jihad Movement fractured,” Saddam had contact with the Taliban, he supported Fazlur Rahman who helped Taliban and al Qaeda leaders make their way into Pakistan, supported action against US troops in Somalia, provided major financial support for the Global Islamic Jihad Movement, and served as a catalyst for al Qaeda. “The stress of losing Saddam and his wealth, plus being soundly defeated in Iraq and Afghanistan, has caused the terrorist leaders alliance to crack,” Robinson said. Maybe the war in Iraq is linked to the War on Terrorism after all.
Lastly, many cry we have done more harm than good. To which Patrick Henry would reply: “Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?”
Henry spoke metaphorically of chains but the chains of Iraqis were very real. They were chains protruding out of rape room walls. They were chains splattered with the blood of helpless men whose wives and children knew not where their husband and father was held but feared the worst. They were chains that held people in place while they were subjected to the worst forms of degradation and torture. They were chains that bound the once healthy and strong, helping to turn them instead into the broken and lifeless bodies of men and women, boys and girls, parents and children, family and friends.
Should we have left such unspeakably ghastly chains in place? Should we have ignored the screams of the tortured, the tears of the scared survivors, and a whole people suffering under the boot of a deranged butcher? And, finally, should we abandon them now, as yet unstable and still torn with violence, to a possible return to dictatorial horrors? To quote Patrick Henry as he drew near to the close of his famous speech, “Forbid it, Almighty God!”
June 18th, 2008 at 11:28 pm
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