One year ago final preparations for the liberation of Iraq were underway. The leaders of America, British and Spain were to convene at a summit in the Azores; not long after, a final ultimatum to Saddam Hussein was expected to be delivered - and rejected. Then, the military destruction of one of history's most bloodcurdling cynosures of fear, oppression and butchery - Saddam's Ba'athist regme, in the heart of the region's culture of death - would commence. Mohammed remembers:
Today, Friday March the 14th. 2003.The dollar exchange price is 2550.
We’re still getting prepared for what the future days will bring with it. Just like every other Iraqi house, we had our emergency plan too. I went with my father downtown to buy a cage from the kind that is used to keep birds or hens but of course we had a different idea for that cage. Simply we’ll use it to hide the satellite receiver dish that we recently bought[,] no matter the risk[,] to keep in touch with the news not wanting to miss anything. The cage sufficiently served our purpose together with a sheet of dark nylon; the dish was successfully hidden.
...Will the world’s attempts to postpone the operations succeed? I don’t know, but I see determination and I don’t think there are surprises on the way. Postponing the operation again? This is killing me. Waiting will break my nerves down. The whole matter should be carried out fast.
The worse I hate are those human shields. I hate them for their stupidity, what peace they seek? Don’t they think for one moment about what’s happening here? We’re already dead. Whom are they defending? I don’t know.
As much as it disturbs me: they were not defending human lives nor human dignity. Saddam's Iraq murderered and violated both on a daily basis. International law was in its twelfth year of failure, toothless United Nations resolutions having exacted nothing from Baghdad but frangible promises and outright defiance. No one defended Saddam's unbelievable, unprovable claims to having disarmed; the only arguments against deposition were raised by those who believed that twelve more years of bureaucratic dithering was necessary and those who believed that Saddam Hussein reserved the right to both the possession of weapons and the tormenting of Iraq's population.
The utopists could scarcely make a distinction between America and Iraq; after all, weren't all men imperfect? Was there such a difference between democracy and Arab Socialism? Shouldn't peace, a magical peace with no terms or logical construction but one that simply fell like rain from the heavens, gain appeal? They followed a monolithic adage: that war was wrong, always, without exception. The introduction of democracies, waging war not eagerly for dominative gain but reluctantly for justice and freedom, had gone unconsidered. Moral equivocation served rhetorical consistency. Wasn't peace preferable to the horrors of war and the heartache of reconstruction, the pain of a democracy's birth? Wasn't it best to let someone else kill - even if deliberately, for the pleasure of it - rather than bloody our own hands with war and accidental civilian death?
The parochialists refused to believe that the military might of free nations could dislodge a dictator's twenty-year-old trunk and roots; they only saw half-measures and failure. Korea, Vietnam, Lebanon. Why bother? Some people were meant for misery, they shrugged. We can't change all regimes in one stroke, they argued - why should we begin now? In their minds, the Pacific and Atlantic stretched on forever, September 11th be damned. If only we kept to ourselves, evil would pass over. If only we paid less attention to systematic cruelty and diabolical scheming in the world, we could live peacefully in the bliss of ignorance. Like the old days.
And then the nihilists. We can only hope that most of them knew nothing about the horrors of Saddam's institutionalized nightmare; that when they focused their hatred towards the very nations defending their right to wrongfully accuse of the worst infractions against mankind, they did not realize how little time would pass before a similar protest in Iraq would send them to prison or worse. Some puppet-wielding paraders proudly gave it to us unambiguously: they supported the Ba'athists, right alongside North Korea's DPRK and Iran's Islamic Republic. Just like they'd supported the Soviet Union. Oh, did they ever have an "Axis of Evil" to show up the "establishment."
When the day came, these three groups stood for philosophies - and against the freedom of the Iraqi people. Their relativistic ideas wrapped around their own identities, they couldn't sacrifice comfortable beliefs to face the spine-chilling reality: appeasement had failed, hundreds of thousands had died while the West waited or looked away, and the looming terrorist threat could only be defeated through the destruction of statist tyrants. No, it was some other way, some better way, and Iraq could wait until opponents of liberation found it. When the day of liberation came, they stood against the Iraqi people. Many of them still do. The Iraqis won't forget. Will we?
THEY SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES: Spain's Socialist leader claims that Iraqi liberation was "a political error for the international order, for the search for cooperation, for the defense of the United States." Political? Of course: if intervention had been prevented the secret police, the rape-rooms, the WMD shadow programs, and the $25,000 payouts to murder-bombers would all have continued. But the appeasers' politics would have remained unspoiled - and that is most important to them.
