Saddam’s Succours, Part 2
by Lindsay Perigo
"I don't want food. I don't want water. I want my freedom."
So said a resident of Umm Qasr, newly liberated by American & British troops, in front of CNN cameras.
In truth, he was not ungrateful for the food & water that came in the wake of the liberation, but most of all he hungered & thirsted for freedom. He knew that to be the most desirable potential consequence of the Coalition presence.
"When will the whole Iraqi population rise up?" asked veteran war reporter Christiane Amanpour. "The day they know Saddam is dead," she answered herself, on the basis of what many Iraqis had whispered to her. Such is the fear this monster, under whose tyranny hundreds of thousands of citizens have unaccountably "disappeared," strikes in the hearts of his subjects as long as he is alive.
Still, the Saddamites in our midst insist that the troops shouldn't be there. They set up straw men in their efforts to justify leaving this despot alone. They ascribe to freedom-lovers such as myself the view that a semi-free country has not only the right but the duty to liberate slave pens. They say we wish to stifle free speech, & that we get sexually aroused by war. These canards are too ridiculous to dignify with a moment's attention.
Some Saddamites are claiming the posthumous imprimatur of Ayn Rand for their views. She too would surely have opposed this war, they claim.
The hell she would!
None had greater contempt for those she called "new isolationists" who purveyed the view that "the fate of other countries is none of our business." "The purpose of this new isolationism," she wrote, "is to play on the American people's legitimate weariness, confusion & anger over Vietnam, in the hope of making the U.S government afraid to become involved in another foreign war of any kind. This would paralyse the U.S. in the conduct of any foreign policy not agreeable to Soviet Russia [read: totalitarian states & their apologists]." None was more adamant in the view that "a dictatorship – a country that violates the rights of its own citizens – is an outlaw & can claim no rights." She had no hesitation in saying that a free country had the right – but not the obligation - to invade a Nazi Germany, a Soviet Russia or a Cuba.
Yes, she was contemptuous of the content & conduct of American foreign policy over the previous fifty years, but, if I may cite "Saddam's Succours" Pt 1, she most certainly would not have invoked past follies to justify inaction & paralysis in the present. The woman who said that the proper answer to "Better Red than dead" was "Better see the Reds dead" was made of sterner stuff than that! It is inconceivable that she would have opposed the current intervention in Iraq; far more likely that she would have favoured "regime change" in Iran, North Korea & other "axis of evil" countries as well.
Those who claim Rand's imprimatur for their advocacy of Chamberlain-type appeasement would do well to ponder the following, from her article, "The Lessons of Vietnam":
"I wondered, even in those years [her youth in Russia], which is morally worse: evil – or the appeasement of evil, the cowardly evasion that leaves an evil unnamed, unanswered & unchallenged. I was inclined to think that the second is worse, because it makes the first possible. I am certain of it today."
I suspect our friend in Umm Qasr is certain of it as well.
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