By Dave Kopel
April 9, 2003
The torture chambers are closed.
The children's prison is empty.
The death squads are dead or in hiding.
Shias, Sunnis, and Chaldean Christians are all celebrating the fall of a
wicked tyrant.
Arabs, Kurds, and Assyrians are dancing with joy and toppling the monstrous
statues.
We were told that the Iraqi people didn't want to be liberated by the West.
We were told that pro-American governments in other countries would be
overthrown by the angry Arab street.
We were told that our military would cause half a million civilian deaths.
Four days after the war began, we were told that we were stuck in a quagmire
like Vietnam.
We were told that Baghdad would be the new Stalingrad.
Too many naïve Americans swallowed the propaganda invented by communist-run front groups which weren't really anti-war - just anti-American and anti-freedom. The same crowd of naysayers that was wrong in every way about liberating Afghanistan was wrong in every way about the liberation of Iraq.
"Not in our name"? You bet it wasn't in their name.
The liberation of Iraq wasn't in the name of Michael Moore or Sean Penn or the millions of demonstrators who would have left the Saddam Fedayeen to terrorize the families of Iraq.
Not in the name of the people who wrote letters demanding that nothing to be done to shut down the torture chambers. Not in the name of the foreign weasels and their American dupes who obstructed each and every effort to free the people of Iraq.
It wasn't in their name. It was in our name. In the names the United States of America and of the United Kingdom, as authorized by overwhelming and bipartisan votes of their democratically elected legislatures. In the name of humanity and freedom and in the name of the eternal principles of the Declaration of Independence.
The liberation of Iraq is a tremendous victory in World War IV. There's still a long way to go until final success. There are still terror-masters and their enablers in Pyongyang, Tehran, Tripoli, Riyadh, Jenin, and Damascus who will inflict on America a blow a thousand times worse than September 11, unless we stop them first. We've made a great beginning-perhaps equivalent to pushing the Germans out of Africa and the Italians out of the war in 1943. Let's finish the job.
