Originally posted by: BaliBabyDoc
I salute the soldiers that died bringing a taste of freedom to an oppressed
society, and died to defend your rights to politicize their deaths...
You do realize the latter half of your statement is a crock of poo? The soldiers dying in Iraq are losing their lives due to the political meanderings of the Bush Regime. At every turn since 9/11, Bushies have politicized every element of national defense. The fact that thousands upon thousands of National Guard and Reserves are toiling in the Middle East is unadulterated evidence of Neocon nocturnal emissions hijacking our country.
I long for the day the Left returns to the defense of a principle other than "oppose whatever Bush supports." As the noted Leftist (still) Christopher Hitchens wrote before the war, if the Left can't get past the inconvenient fact that they're on the same side of an issue as George Bush, and instead focus on the unescapable fact that regime change in Iraq is for the betterment of humanity in that part of the world, then of what good are they?
Hitchens wrote in 2/03, just after the London Peace March:
"DURING the many years I spent on the Left, the cause of self-determination for Kurdistan was high on the list of principles and priorities - there are many more Kurds than there are Palestinians and they have been staunch fighters for democracy in the region.
It would have been a wonderful thing if hundreds of thousands of people had flooded into London's Hyde Park and stood in solidarity with this, one of the most important struggles for liberty in the world today.
Instead, the assortment of forces who assembled demanded, in effect, that Saddam be allowed to keep the other five-sixths of Iraq as his own personal torture chamber.
There are not enough words in any idiom to describe the shame and the disgrace of this."
Or from 10/02, explaining why he left The Nation:
"You might think that the Left could have a regime-change perspective of its own, based on solidarity with its comrades abroad. After all, Saddam's ruling Ba'ath Party consolidated its power by first destroying the Iraqi communist and labor movements, and then turning on the Kurds (whose cause, historically, has been one of the main priorities of the Left in the Middle East). When I first became a socialist, the imperative of international solidarity was the essential if not the defining thing, whether the cause was popular or risky or not. I haven't seen an anti-war meeting all this year at which you could even guess at the existence of the Iraqi and Kurdish opposition to Saddam, an opposition that was fighting for "regime change" when both Republicans and Democrats were fawning over Baghdad as a profitable client and geopolitical ally. Not only does the "peace" movement ignore the anti-Saddam civilian opposition, it sends missions to console the Ba'athists in their isolation, and speaks of the invader of Kuwait and Iran and the butcher of Kurdistan as if he were the victim and George W. Bush the aggressor.
Some peaceniks clear their throats by saying that, of course, they oppose Saddam Hussein as much as anybody, though not enough to support doing anything about him.
But some don't even bother to make this disavowal. In the United States, the main organizer of anti-war propaganda is Ramsey Clark, who perhaps understandably can't forgive himself for having been Lyndon Johnson's attorney general. However, he fails to live down this early disgrace by acting as a front man for a sinister sect -- the International Action Center, cover name for the Workers World Party -- which refuses to make any criticism of the Saddam regime. It is this quasi-Stalinist group, co-organized by a man with the wondrous name of Clark Kissinger, which has recruited such figures as Ed Asner and Marisa Tomei to sign the "Not In Our Name" petition. Funny as this may be in some ways (I don't think the administration is going to war in the name of Ed Asner or Marisa Tomei, let alone Gore Vidal), it is based on a surreptitious political agenda. In Britain, the chief spokesman of the "anti-war" faction is a Labour MP named George Galloway, who is never happier than when writing moist profiles of Saddam and who says that the collapse of the Soviet Union was the worst moment of his life.
Instead of internationalism, we find among the Left now a sort of affectless, neutralist, smirking isolationism. In this moral universe, the views of the corrupt and conservative Jacques Chirac -- who built Saddam Hussein a nuclear reactor, knowing what he wanted it for -- carry more weight than those of persecuted Iraqi democrats. In this moral universe, the figure of Jimmy Carter -- who incited Saddam to attack Iran in 1980, without any U.N. or congressional consultation that I can remember -- is considered axiomatically more statesmanlike than Bush.
Sooner or later, one way or another, the Iraqi and Kurdish peoples will be free of Saddam Hussein. When that day comes, I am booked to have a reunion in Baghdad with several old comrades who have been through hell. We shall not be inviting anyone who spent this precious time urging democratic countries to give Saddam another chance."
Has the Left now become so blinded by hatred of Bush that all they can do is look at an Iraq finally freed of a butcher's yoke and lament? Relieving the suffering of millions may be good and all, but if it helps Bush in the slightest little bit, it just wasn't worth it, eh? Sad.