More from the K Street boys. Following is a response from Sparky to Spanky's previous message.
-----Original Message-----
From: Sparky
Sent: Saturday, April 17, 2004 5:05 PM
To: Spanky
Subject: RE: Curious
I don't think quoting state department speeches if very helpful where human rights are concerned. The striped-pants boys don't mind if you kill a couple of thousand of your own people discreetly as long as you hold your liquor and use the right salad fork at state dinners. The President has always included the humanitarian argument in his key speeches, stating in the State of the Union:
"The dictator who is assembling the world's most dangerous weapons has already used them on whole villages -- leaving thousands of his own citizens dead, blind, or disfigured. Iraqi refugees tell us how forced confessions are obtained -- by torturing children while their parents are made to watch. International human rights groups have catalogued other methods used in the torture chambers of Iraq: electric shock, burning with hot irons, dripping acid on the skin, mutilation with electric drills, cutting out tongues, and rape. If this is not evil, then evil has no meaning. (Applause.) And tonight I have a message for the brave and oppressed people of Iraq: Your enemy is not surrounding your country -- your enemy is ruling your country. (Applause.) And the day he and his regime are removed from power will be the day of your liberation. (Applause.)
There are other statements by the President in the same vein. This speaks directly to your counterfactual assertion that the administration, rather than State (which is always the weak reed in upholding American values abroad) has provided :"no sense anywhere in that speech that the purpose of war in Iraq is to free the Iraqi people, to stop the torture and killing of innocents." There is no question the administration and everyone else thought Saddam had operational WMD's but it is also true that Iraq posed a unique chance, because of U.N. violations, the fact that he had violated the ceasefire terms of the First Gulf War, location and the relatively cosmopolitan nature of the place to transform the middle east. That is what we are trying to do.
Afghanistan was not enough because Afghanistan did not serve as a rally point for the Middle East as Saddam has. It was a great terror haven but it did not have oil and the prestige of having survived the First Gulf War. Moreover, the unorthodox tactics used there allowed opponants to argue that it was not a good indicator of American power in a shooting war.
Of course its sad to see soldiers die (and I think we have too many women too close to combat) but your scheme of "declaring victory" and leaving is foolishness. There were journalists and opponants of the Bush administration yearning to yell quagmire during the sandstorm a week or so into the war. As I said before our troops will have to be there a while. In the brief days we have had this correspondence the baby-mulluh has been isolated and is a figure of ridicule in Al Najaf. That city has celebrated a major Shia religious holiday without incident and Falluja is being reduced and seranaded.
That "false coalition" John Kerry would disband has produced a hero who died like a Roman of the ancient times, Fabrizio Quatrrocchi (From Naples, my Daddy notes with pride), the British, Japanese and Poles have stood like a stone wall and again the forces of dissolution have been thwarted. So far, so good.
Posted by publius at April 19, 2004 02:35 PM