The humanitarian case for war in Iraq
That’s the title of Jeff Jacoby’s piece this week. He cites Pamela Bone, who met a group of female Iraqi emigrees in November of 2000:
“They told me that in Iraq, the country they had fled, women were beheaded with swords and their heads nailed to the front doors of their houses, as a lesson to other women. The executed women had been dishonoring their country with their sexual crimes, and this behavior could not be tolerated, the then-Iraqi leader, Saddam Hussein, had said on national television. More than 200 women had been executed in this manner in the previous three weeks…. Because the claims seemed so extreme, I checked Amnesty International’s country report…. Some of the women’s ’sexual crimes’ were having been raped by one of Saddam’s sons. One of the women executed was a doctor who had complained of corruption in the government health department.”
By my reckoning, if that’s a typical rate, that works out to about 3476 per year. Call it 3000. In the three years since the invasion, that’s 9000 heads that have not been removed from their owners’ bodies and nailed to the front doors of their homes.
Of course, these are statistical head counts, in contrast to the 2300 actual heads of American soldiers who have died since the invasion. Now the left may believe a soldier’s life is too much to pay to save 3.9 Iraqi women, but I can imagine valid arguments otherwise, even if we assume no other good has occurred as the result of the invasion.
Writes Jacoby:
…one voice I miss more than ever is that of Michael Kelly. The first journalist to die while covering the war, Kelly was the editor of The Atlantic and a columnist for The Washington Post. He had covered the liberation of Kuwait in 1991, and in one of his last columns, filed from Kuwait City, he reflected on the coming liberation of Iraq: “Tyranny truly is a horror: an immense, endlessly bloody, endlessly painful, endlessly varied, endless crime against not humanity in the abstract but a lot of humans in the flesh. It is, as Orwell wrote, a jackboot forever stomping on a human face.
“I understand why some dislike the idea, and fear the ramifications, of America as a liberator. But I do not understand why they do not see that anything is better than life with your face under the boot. And that any rescue of a people under the boot (be they Afghan, Kuwaiti, or Iraqi) is something to be desired. Even if the rescue is less than perfectly realized. Even if the rescuer is a great, overmuscled, bossy, selfish oaf. Or would you, for yourself, choose the boot?”
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March 23rd, 2006 at 11:05 am
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