Tuesday, March 18, 2003 |
11:48 - Changing the World
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3284-614607,00.html
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Everybody's linking this Ann Clwyd piece, the one describing the human shredder machine and other pieces of Iraqi innovation that Chirac and others are desperate to preserve. Andrew Sullivan's response:
What Clwyd says - clearly, unforgettably, indelibly - is something that some people think is unsophisticated or crude or manipulative. What she says is that the Saddam regime is evil. I'm aware of the argument that there are many evil regimes in the world and we aren't invading to destroy all of them. But there comes a point at which such arguments say less about the world and more about the people making them. Saddam's regime is certainly one of the vilest on earth. Its malevolence and brutality is documented beyond dispute. In a world in which morality matters, the leading theologians and moralists and politicians would not be bending over backwards to find arguments to leave this regime alone, to lend credence to its lies, and to appease its poisons. They would be casting about for reasons to end it. I think that is what has given Blair his strength these past few months. He knows he's right.
And on NPR this morning, there were interviews with fleeing Iraqi citizens, packing up their belongings into wheelbarrows and heading for the hills. Why? Surely, to avoid the Americans' missiles, right? Wrong. According to the interviewees that the reporter talked to, what the Iraqis feared most in the coming days-- once the war begins-- is Saddam and the Iraqi army. Apparently the army has already been going through and spraying bullets into the various towns; the fleeing people showed the bullet holes to the interviewer. These guys never once mentioned fear of getting blown up by Americans. They fear what their own country's leadership and muscle will do to them once chaos begins to reign.
These are the kinds of things that the world has grown accustomed to just letting happen, over the past several decades. It's more humane, more culturally sensitive, more live-and-let-live to just avoid all contact with countries that exist in a state of medieval brutality. We've internalized our own postmodern Prime Directive: don't interfere, because it's not our business. They'll just end up resenting us anyway. Well, that's all going to change now.
It's time this world entered the modern age. And I mean the whole world, too, not just those privileged countries that have the luxury to make a choice about it.
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