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Tuesday, April 01, 2003
Dazed and confused...mostly confused.
Occasionally I start reading posts in one blog and click on a link in a post that takes me to another blog and then soon I don't remember where I started and I how I got there. That's how I came across this somewhat long post by Sasha Castel-Dodge:
Forgive me for not having written much over the past few days. Part of it was due to the site being down due to maxed out bandwitdth AGAIN, but part of it was due to...well, something else I can't quite put my finger on.
Here at Casa Dodge just off our bedroom is a tiny room that serves as a storage area. Out-of-season clothes, books, knicknacks, and all manner of things find their home here, including several boxes of stuff that I brought with me from my apartment in New York, but have yet to decide if I'm taking to England or not.
A few days ago I was rummaging around in there for a book, and I happened upon a box that had not been opened. I sat down and looked through it. What I found made me cry like a lost child.
Newspapers and magazines from my hometown, the dates beginning September 12, 2001 The New York Times: "US ATTACKED: HIJACKED JETS DESTROY TWIN TOWERS AND HIT PENTAGON IN DAY OF TERROR". The Daily News: "10,000 FEARED DEAD". New York Post: "ACT OF WAR: WORLD TRADE CENTER DESTROYED, MANY DEAD". New York Magazine, no headline, just the date "September 11, 2001" and a photo of the smoldering towers.
All and all, it starts out quite well....then it turns maudlin...and then it makes a hard right turn into the misguided. I'll leave the maudlin (it's almost Noonan-esque) to you to peruse at your leisure, and I'll cut to, in my opinion, the just plain wrong.
There I sat, on the floor of the storage room, newspapers strewn all around me as I cried. And I thought to myself, this isn't so different, what we are going through now. The families of Iraq, fathers killed by a murderous regime, mothers raped, children kidnapped and tortured, to serve some bloody idea of Saddam's omnipotence. With Al Qaeda, it left thousands of destroyed families in New York, even as we never saw the men threatening us. Saddam is just as deadly and even more visible to his tormented citizens.
I have nothing but the vilest comtempt(sic) for those who oppose the liberation of Iraq. Perhaps our forces will not bring perfect democracy to Iraq. That is certainly a lot to hope for. But anything is better than the fear, that fear that we all felt in the aftermath of September 11, that our families may be cruelly taken from us because of some fanatic. We feel it here in the USA, and we can empathize with the people in Iraq who feel it too. The Australians, too, understand; they lost hundreds in the Bali nightclub massacre. The French and Germans do not understand: they think that feeding the monster will make it more docile. It won't, it just makes it more ravenous. And they are willing to sacrifice American and English and Australian lives to keep it sated.
We are fighting for freedom of the Iraqi people, to be sure, but we are also fighting to free ourselves from that fear that has lingered since that awful day a year and a half ago. We as Americans are refusing to be hostages anymore. We will not let rogue states, jihadists, monomaniacal dictators or anyone else tell us what the destiny of America should be. It will be difficult but we cannot shy away from the fight. We must realize that we are taking our future, and the future of the free world, into our hands. And I hope that all the French, Germans, Turks, anti-war protesters and fifth-columnists realize it too.
Leaving aside the obvious, Saddam is not Bin Laden, Ms. Castel-Dodge takes her sorrow and her fear and uses it to justify the invasion of a country that is resulting in the deaths of these same people with whom she empathizes. She has taken a hold of the ever-shifting rationale for invading Iraq (It's Saddam...he's behind bin Laden...okay, he's not, but he's has WMD's...okay we can't find them, but they are there...and he backs terrorists like al Qaeda...and he's threatened America...okay he hasn't threatened America, but he could....and it's about saving the people of Iraq, because now we really, really care about them, even when we didn't before 9/11...and it's definitely not about oil....repeat until you start to believe it) and convinced herself that somehow, after ridding the world of Saddam Hussein, that all the fear and bad vibes and feelings of impotence will just melt away. That's a convenient justification, and I'm sure a comforting one too, but it's also misplaced rage. We can't find the real bad guy behind 9/11, so we transfer our anger to another guy, and if we have to inflict some collateral damage on his country and kill a few thousand innocent civilians in the process, well, that's an acceptable risk that we are willing to take in their name.
We will destroy their country in order to save them.
How very generous of us. How humane. And we get to feel good about ourselves as a bonus.
I've heard this all before...and this joke's not funny anymore.
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