March 31, 2003
SO FEW HOLD SO MANY HOSTAGE:
Praying to survive: Iraqi deserter tells of desperation across the line (AP, 3/31/2003)"The army knows I ran away. They could come and take revenge," he said in the central police barracks in Kalak, about 20 miles northwest of the Kurdish administrative center Irbil. "My only hope is that I'm not alone. There are so many deserters and those who want to run. They cannot attack all these families with a war going on."War for this foot soldier was one of desperation. "We only prayed we'd stay alive long enough to get a chance to escape," Ali said through an interpreter....
"The spirit of the soldiers is very low," he said. "We were not really mad at the Americans. We just want to save our lives."
He and four other soldiers decided to run. But they had to pick their moment. Their unit and most others include Baathist agents given orders to execute any deserters, he said....
"The people know that any uprising against Saddam now would mean terrible things to them and their family. They force them to chant `Down with America,' but not everyone means it. Saddam's people are afraid for the future."
That's when he started to cry.
The war is terrible, but only because the evil of Saddam's regime makes it so. Many have likened the war to a giant hostage rescue. We are rescuing the civilian hostages, but many of the soldier-hostages are dying.
Totalitarian dictatorships survive because of 'divide-and-rule' tactics, coupled with the cowardice and lack of cooperative spirit among their populace. If a few soldiers could only band together, they could easily kill their Baathist minders. But they fear betrayal, and don't dare suggest even to their friends an attack on their captors. Courage and cooperativeness are the cultural prerequisites of freedom. Only the home of the brave, and the community of the associative, can hope to become a land of the free.
Posted by Paul Jaminet at March 31, 2003 8:26 PMI wonder why all of those people who were deriding the President's "simplicity" in calling out an axis of evil are suddenly so quiet?
Posted by: Kevin Whited at March 31, 2003 9:58 PMThey’re currently in a fugue state brought on by a sudden and jolting dose of cold harsh reality. I have ever confidence that once they’ve recovered the denial response will kick in and the rose coloured glasses, whose lenses hue is tinted with the blood of innocence, will quickly be replaced and their world view restored.
In my opinion the basis of much modern secular humanism (strapping on the flame retardant underwear) is a perverse marriage of Rousseau and Nietzsche. For these folks there can be no evil, for if evil exists in the world then their entire philosophy is undermined. No truly evil men like Saddam are “monsters”, “inhuman”, “brutes”, and the like. Every intent is made to dehumanize them because that absolves the human element of it’s culpability. The fact is that what makes those like Saddam so terrible is that they are very human indeed, and thus the potential for that degree of evil exists in all of us.