It was fun while it lasted, Dean supporters...

I guess you're not going to get all those free government bike paths
after all.


Saddam in Jail; Leftists Wail
By Greg Yardley
FrontPageMagazine.com | December 17, 2003


The morning I heard Saddam Hussein was captured, I was awakened by a
low murmur I couldn't quite place. When I read the good news for the
first time, I immediately realized what it must be - the collective of
far-left anti-war protestors wailing and gnashing their teeth.


Sure enough, the first thing I found when I sat down to look were
leftists bemoaning the news, since they believed Hussein's capture
would improve President Bush's re-election chances. As James Taranto
at Opinion Journal noted, the angry supporters of Howard Dean were
crestfallen by the capture of Saddam Hussein - one woman, more
pessimistic than average, wrote in to Dean's ‘Blog For America' to say
"I can't believe this. I'm crying here. I feel that we now don't
have a chance in this election." A person with the pen name
‘Muslims4Dean' replied "If the Death toll mounts - good. It will
teach the American people not to support Nazi Republicans."


It's unfortunate that some Americans place partisan domestic politics
over the removal of a murderous dictator, something the entire world
should rightfully celebrate. However, this wasn't unexpected.
Leftist authors, political commentators, and organizations have long
been implying that anything contributing to the electoral defeat of
President Bush was fine with them, even the unfortunate deaths of
American soldiers abroad. When good news comes out of Iraq, they're
forced to frantically downplay it.


In order to make the capture of Saddam Hussein seem insignificant or
even a negative for America, the left must frantically downplay its
importance, while continuing to attack America for ever defending
itself in the first place. That's exactly the strategy media gadfly
Michael Moore chose when he commemorated Hussein's capture by bitterly
denouncing the United States. He stated that the capture had not
"made us one bit safer in our post-9/11 world," and spent the bulk of
his article reminding the public that Hussein was once America's ally
against Iran - neglecting to mention that at that point in the early
1980s, Iran had held over fifty Americans hostage for more than a
year.


Other leftists have closely followed Moore's two main themes - the
relative unimportance of Hussein's capture and the United States'
prior good relationship with Hussein. Indymedia chose to analyze the
good news by publicizing an already widely-circulated 1983 photo of
Hussein shaking hands with Donald Rumsfield. The Guerilla News
Network published a bile-filled rant calling the capture another
‘moment that does not really matter' in a campaign to ‘return Iraq to
its rightful place, the third world.' Greg Palast of Z Magazine
decided the occasion called for a rather limp satire about the ‘back
pay' America owes Saddam. At the left-wing The Nation, David Corn
tried to turn the capture into a negative for America, arguing that
Hussein's capture may just embolden Islamist terrorists unaffiliated
with Saddam. In places, radical news sites have been so eager to
criticize the achievements of the American military they put forward
contradictory theories; for instance, the website Counterpunch
published an Independent article by Robert Fisk, "This Won't Stop the
Guerilla War," right beside a piece by David Lindorff called "The
Saddam Dilemma." The former argues that the capture of Saddam means
nothing, since the ‘resistance' is not Baathist; the later argues that
keeping Hussein in custody will make him a focal point for Baathist
guerrillas bent on revenge.


It's often difficult to tell whether these leftist commentators
believe what they're saying, or if they're just trying to do damage
control for a badly-stung batch of anti-war Democratic presidential
candidates. The farthest left, however, really do believe Hussein's
capture changes nothing. Wrapped in their Marxist fantasies of
revolutions and class struggle, they see the ongoing terrorism in Iraq
as an indigenous anti-imperialist resistance, having little to do with
Saddam Hussein or the remnants of his Baath Party thugs. They deftly
ignore the dancing in the streets of Baghdad, preferring to dismiss
the pro-American Iraqis as a small group of ‘collaborators' completely
unrepresentative of the general population.


The de facto leader of this pack of ideological throwbacks, the
Workers World Party-led International ANSWER, released a statement
shortly after Hussein's capture. In it, they reassure their
supporters that they will continue on with their anti-American
organizing. In their own words, "The seizure and public display of
Saddam Hussein may be a propaganda victory for imperialism, but it
changes nothing fundamental about the situation in Iraq." In their
fevered imagination, by overthrowing Hussein, the United States
somehow "removed the essential features of sovereignty for the Iraqi
people." In a century-out-of-date analysis lifted right out of
Lenin's ‘Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism,' the war with
Iraq is portrayed as nothing more than a war of colonization. Their
attitude towards the removal of the Butcher of Baghdad? They simply
don't care. The Hudson Valley Activist Newsletter, produced by strong
supporters of International ANSWER, spelled this attitude out clearly:
"The U.S. government and mass media are beating the war drums of joy
and victory over the capture of former President Saddam Hussein of
Iraq, but the U.S. peace movement certainly has no cause to
celebrate."


No cause to celebrate. Not a bit of cheer at the corralling of a
notorious filler of mass graves, not if that happens to benefit
America.


In the near future, the American far left will try to turn the capture
of Hussein into an opportunity. Many are already calling for
Hussein's trial to be conducted by an international court, controlled
by the United Nations. By transferring Hussein to the International
Court of Justice at The Hague, they can both take the death penalty
off the table and drag out the Iraqi people's desire for justice for
years. Leftists want a United Nations-controlled trial not just
because they oppose the death penalty; they would also like to use the
opportunity to embarrass the government. For instance, Center for
Constitutional Rights head Michael Ratner has been arguing on Pacifica
Radio that any trial that didn't also try the United States itself
would be "trying the puppet without the puppeteer."


These leftists can be countered simply by pointing out that no matter
what they say, the capture of Saddam Hussein was a historic event, and
the American people know it - a Gallup poll showed that eight out of
ten believe Saddam's arrest was a ‘significant achievement.' Every
day, more documentary evidence emerges showing that Hussein's
government was indeed a threat to American security - for instance,
Iraq's coalition government now claims to have documentary evidence
that 9/11 organizer Mohammad Atta trained in Baghdad during the summer
of 2001, taught by the infamous Palestinian terrorist Abu Nidal, with
the full knowledge of Saddam Hussein. As for America's past support
for Hussein, this only increased our obligation to remove him. The
logic of the left here is puzzling - because of Hussein's cooperation
with the Reagan administration in the early 1980s, he should not have
been removed in 2003? Apparently, in the leftist mind, being allied
with a past American administration gives rogue states a ‘threaten
America free' card for the rest of their existence.


No one is certain just how many Iraqi terrorists acted out of loyalty
to Hussein, and how many are loyal to Islamist terrorist movements.
That's why President Bush clearly told the American people that "the
capture of Saddam Hussein does not mean the end of violence in Iraq.
We still face terrorists who would rather go on killing the innocent."
And that's why the American left's near-unanimous pessimism is so
unjustifiable. They're no more able to predict the future than the
rest of us - and given their track record over the last year, you'd
think they'd refrain from making any predictions at all. They claimed
they could stop a war against Iraq with their protests, and they
couldn't. They claimed the American army would face fierce
resistance, and it didn't. They claimed there would be a quagmire
outside Baghdad, and there wasn't. They claimed the war would cause
massive civilian casualties, and it didn't. They claimed the war
would lead to terrorist attacks on American soil, and it hasn't. Now
they're claiming the capture of Saddam means nothing, and terrorism in
the Middle East will continue on unabated. If they're right, it'll be
for the first time. In the meantime, it's too bad they can't put
their hatred of the President aside, and join the rest of America in
celebrating the bringing of a tyrant to justice.