Poor Old Saddam - How Could We Have Been So Mean?

A leftist friend of mine wrote this in response to my article "The Moral Sword" on Christians and preemptive war:

• A better analogy is there is a man who in the past beat up his neighbors. His limbs were crippled and his weapons taken away. You suspect that he may have acquired new weapons. The police are currently searching him, but you can't wait for them to finish because you WANT to throw him from his wheelchair and beat him senseless. So that's exactly what you do. Then you have the audacity to claim that this is Christian behavior. Hiding behind the flag and hiding behind a cross doesn't change the fact that there was no moral or legal justification for Bush's war of choice in Iraq.

Seriously? He's comparing Sadaam Hussein to an injured man in a wheelchair? The same guy who slaughtered Shiites who attempted to revolt. The same guy who left ditches full of villagers who displeased him. The same guy who, had we not had armed aircraft flying cap over the Khurds, would cheerfully have slaughtered them as well?


If he was in a wheelchair, the man at the very least had an AK-47 laying across his lap. And he threw the police out. They couldn't search for anything. Why do you guys insist on painting that psychotic megalomaniac as though he were some poor mistreated, misunderstood humanitarian. If he could have gotten his hands on a nuke or two Saddam would have used them in a heartbeat. Everyone knew it and were scared he would; so much so that Democrats voted overwhelmingly to support President Bush's preemptive strike agains Hussein at the mere hint that he "might" be trying to get his hands on weapons grade uranium.

It's not like we wanted to hurt Iraqis. That's a major flaw in leftist rhetoric on the subject. They assume the Iraqis were loyal to Saddam Hussien. They weren't. They deserted in droves as soon as they knew we were coming. They danced in the streets as soon as Saddam got out of Dodge. When he was gone, we shut down the war and declared it over - perhaps a bit prematurely, but such was the desire to stop shooting at rank and file Iraqi people that we were prepared to risk stopping all out war (which is safer for our soldiers) so we could better avoid hurting innocents. It cost American lives to do so, but then, that's just the sort of people we are.

What people don't realize is that we dropped and fired more explosives and bullets than in WWI and WWII put together and didn't kill but a miniscule fraction of the people. We tried very hard not to hurt innocent people and our soldiers often were hurt or killed as a result of that reluctance.

As to our cruelty toward poor helpless Saddam Hussein, he deserved what he got. We should have gone all the way to Baghdad and strung him up the first time. A lot of innocent Iraqis would be alive now if we had and we wouldn't still be digging up mass graves in the Iraqi desert.

As Colin Powell said on visiting the site of a small village where Saddam's soldiers machine-gunned every man, woman and child because a teenager threw a rock at him, "We should have done this years ago."

I wasn't hiding behind anything in saying it was a hard decision.  It  is not a peculiarly Christian behavior -  conducting a war to stop a genocidal maniac like Saddam Hussein. There are other religions and philosophies that find his sort of behavior unacceptable too and condone the act of taking such a person down for the sake of others. The strong in many faiths are expected to protect the weak.

No audacity to it. I never said attacking another country something Christians routinely do as an act of faith. What I actually said was, "When someone acts like he has weapons of mass destruction, denies he has them, but has a history of outright lying about the subject, then "What do we do about it?" becomes a tougher question. On a personal level, that kind of situation requires a personal relationship with God and some coaching on His part to figure out the answer - and I've found that, in such situations, God does present the answers."

Translation: "Figuring out what is the right thing to do with evil despots is something you have to work out between yourself and God."

Liberals keep saying there was no moral or legal justification for the war in Iraq. There actually was. The original cease fire, which was still in effect, specified that weapons inspectors would be permitted inside Iraq to insure they were not building WMDs. It was clearly proven that Hussein was stalling, delaying and shuffling truckloads of stuff around the country in an attempt to keep inspectors from looking at it. After the war, scientists in his weapons program led soldiers to caches of materials he'd ordered buried in the desert. Weapons labs were uncovered (but not reported to the public) all over Iraq. AND Hussein threw out the inspectors completely, a clear violation of the treaty. We had a perfect legal right, according to the treaty to continue the earlier conflict. Hussein's treaty violations were in and of themselves an act of war and the treaty called for war to begin at the moment of those violations.
I love the Palestinian treaty logic - the kind where you sign a treaty and as soon as the Israelis stop blowing you up with tanks and planes, you lob some missiles over the border and then complain loudly when the Israelis shoot back.

The point of my earlier post was that what to do is a hard decision. The principle of turning the other cheek, which we do a lot of as Americans, and the powerful desire to right wrongs and defend the innocent, are usually in conflict. I made it pretty clear what I believe, but left the subject pretty open-ended.

If your philosophy is to "absorb" damage because you believe we somehow deserve it or because it is morally right to do so, us being bigger and stronger and somehow owe it to the less fortunate to let them crash planes into our skycrapers and set off bombs in public places and otherwise take out their frustrations on us, then it is absolutely your right to believe that is the right course of action.

All I was saying was that it's hard for Christians to stand by and watch wholesale murder. We certainly didn't like it in Yugoslavia (and it was Muslims being slaughtered there). I cheered when President Clinton stepped in to stop it. We didn't like it when the Hutus and Tutsis murdered each other or when warlords drafted child soldiers into their armies in Chad and the Sudan.

My question to my liberal and libertarian buddies is, "Should America intervene militarily to help the helpless or to depose evil dictators?"

___ No. It's none of our business!

___ Not if we think we can "control" the evil despot by smart diplomacy.

___ Yes. In all cases, even if it interferes with the rulers of a sovereign nation,

___ Only when the oppressed agree with us?

___ Only when the oppressed are nothing like us and, frankly hate our guts?

___ Only if the people being oppressed ask us to (even though how we find out what 'the people' might be somewhat problemtic)?

___ Only if they don't have any oil or anything valuable to sell us?

___ Only if they belong to a trade union?

___ Only if a Democrat is president?

Honestly, I wonder sometimes if liberal commenters actually read things before they post or do they merely press some kind of "talking points" button and phrases like "hiding behind the flag" and "no moral or legal justification" just spew out? I mean, I'm up for a discussion and the wheelchair story was at least an attempt to address the point with an analogy, albeit one that really doesn't fit. But wouldn't it be refreshing if they would speak to the text and not to what they think is behind the text or to what they assume some ignorant redneck tea-bagger like me probably said somewhere in that big old sea of text up there that they didn't want to have to actually read for comprehension.

Tom King

The Problem Is, Isolationists Don't Understand Bullies!

 I watched an interview with President Bush last night.  He was unapologetic for taking us into Afghanistan and Iraq.  God bless him.  He took the responsibility for the decision, a rare thing for a politician to do.  Lately he's been taking the responsibility for all President Obama's screwups too.  I admire him for his patience in not speaking out in his own defense.  GW is a class act. He understands the proper balance between the Golden Rule and a leader's charge to protect his people from thugs and bullies.

I was reminded of his policy of preemptive military action, when a reader of my last weblog took me to task for defending the principle on which Bush based his military action.  I've written extensively about how the "fortress defense" as proposed by both Liberals and Libertarians, is absolutely wrong and won't get us anything but overrun in the end.  I believe you have to go after your enemies when they go after you.  You don't respond to military style attacks (machine guns, bombs, missiles and projectile aircraft) by sending police to arrest people.  It's stupid and doesn't work.

My friend responded saying, "Probably would not be a good idea to try that tactic on the playground..... "striking your potential enemies". Good way to start a problem.... and would def. not solve the problem. I think the counsel given in the NT might be better."

That all sounds reasonable on the face of it, but I can tell you from hard experience, the playground analogy doesn't work.  In fact, it proves my very point.  

On every peaceful playground there is one superpower - the teacher. To keep peace on the playground the teacher intervenes right now or else bullies and thugs reign supreme and the little ones are persecuted unmercifully.  When I was a teacher, I had a peaceful playground because I practiced President Bush's doctrine of strategic response.  I watched the kids closely and I picked off the bullies before they could get started. Having been on the receiving end of bullying, I recognized it when I saw it happening and took immediate preemptive action.  At the first indication that one of my young hoodlums was going to torment a smaller kid, I caught 'em up by the scruff of the neck and set them down the playground wall.  They soon learned to play nice or they wouldn't be allowed to play at all.

I grew up in a school with an unsupervised playground. The teachers often stayed inside to grade papers for the first 15 to 20 minutes of recess.  It made for a miserable time of it for the smaller kids.  I didn't bother anybody (according to my friend's and the New Testament's suggestions).  I was skinny and small and made good grades.  I might as well have worn a target on my chest.  The local bully boys tormented me until I finally either got tired or (in one case) bloodied a nose.  I finally decided I didn't mind getting beat up for standing up to them  If I stood up to them, my beating usually was spectacular enough to draw the attention of a teacher and they'd get in trouble and have to miss a few recesses which made for a few days of precious peace.  Since it discouraged them from messing with me, I figured being on the receiving end of a little pain was worth it.  I went home bruised and bloodied many a day, but the local thugs finally got tired of getting a few bruises of their own and winding up in detention for their trouble.  The teachers knew I was a peaceful kid and was being bullied, so I never got in trouble for defending myself.  The bullying kept up till eighth grade, after which, they finally left me alone for the most part.  That was partially because I grew big enough that they thought I might have become a threat to their own noses.  

Ironically, the reader who made the playground analogy, actually went to my elementary and high school and knew the bullies I was talking about. Somehow, though, he missed the lesson I learned all too well.  Bullies do not forgo bullying just because you leave them alone or try to be nice to them. They are predators and only understand a rapid and forceful response - usually by whoever is the local superpower.

There was one guy in particular that one afternoon took a basketball away from a bunch of the smaller guys that were playing at the other end of the basketball court.  Without the ball, we couldn't play any more.  He did it for no other reason than to spoil our fun. Mr. Pauly, our PE coach and principal hadn't come out onto the court for PE yet, so we were unsupervised and at the mercy of the school bullies.

I had got tired of their thuggery and went after the ball. My nemesis snatched it back.  I got nose to nose with the guy and explained rather heatedly that he had no right to take our basketball from us. I told him exactly what I thought of him.

He hit me square in the face with a hard right.  I put my hand to my face. It came away with a considerable amount of fresh blood.  I glared at him eye to eye, then turned and walked away just as Mr. Pauly came out of the building.  He saw my face and asked why I was bleeding.  I mumbled something about a basketball and went inside to clean up.

For some reason this particular guy didn't bother me much any more after I stood up to him and took a punch in the face.  I think he was ashamed of himself for attacking me.  He was also scared of the consequences if I told the principal who had hit me.

Like Pres. Obama suggested the U.S. ought to do, I "absorbed the attack".  It probably protected the younger and smaller kids from bullying at least for that day.  After he hit me, he threw the ball back to the others and Mr. Pauly watched them like a hawk.  The principal knew what had happened even without proof and all the playground thugs knew what would happened if they gave him any excuse to punish one of them.

You see I had this guy's fate in my hands.  If I'd told Mr. Pauly, he'd have been in far more trouble than he wanted to be.  He was already in trouble most of the time anyway.

Mr. Pauly, as principal of the school, was the superpower you see.  This young man knew the principal would take action if there was any more nonsense - severe and stern action that would make this boy very uncomfortable indeed.  They still used paddles in those days and Mr. P had a powerful arm.

Roosevelt had it right.  "Speak softly and carry a big stick!"  If the local bully boys know you'll use that stick, it makes for a much more peaceful world for you and everyone about you.

People who don't understand that may simply have had such really good teachers that the bullies were kept in line.  They might have been too young to understand why their world's were so peaceful and sheltered when they were children, so they take it for granted that being peaceful insures others will be peaceful to you.

Either that OR they were running with the bullies themselves and still, as grown adults, don't recognize the harm and misery they inflicted on their classmates with their thuggery.

I am a devout practitioner of the Golden Rule.  I have often "absorbed attacks" rather than retaliating because it was the right thing to do.  I get that whole New Testament advice and apply it on a personal level.

However, the role of a government, a teacher or other type of leadership is to protect its charges from those who would, without just cause, attack them.  God, Himself, called upon kings and rulers to defend his people.  That's what soldiers do and it is an honorable profession if you take up the sword reluctantly and only to defend those weaker than yourself. It's not a bad job for those who are strong and tempted to be bullies themselves - a way to exorcise those demons by protecting rather than attacking.

Or as King Arthur said, "Not 'Might is right,'  but 'Might FOR right!".

That's my opinion whether you like it or not.

Tom King - Tyler, TX