Terrorism

With all the reviews of Oliver Stone’s film, W (which looks like an overly long SNL skit), I keep seeing critics complain that President Bush is a failure, and that the low favorability ratings sort of prove that he’s a failure. 

Two things to note in that regard- people are sometimes clueless creatures who can’t make up their minds from one minute to another.  One day  they love you, the next day they hate you for seemingly no good reason.  Let’s face it, most people are self-involved, don’t care to have anything but a cursory glance at the facts, and would rather be watching episodes of Lost or Desperate Housewives than studying politics, history, or the world around them.

To go along with point 1, the fact is to proclaim the man a failure is to totally confuse the meaning of the word itself.  After an unprecedented attack on American soil, we went after the terrorist organization who harbored and propped up the thugs responsible.  In the process, we freed millions weighed down by the chains of tyranny.  A noble goal, no doubt. 

After that, it was decided that another murderous despot named Saddam Hussein would be held responsible for 11 years of thumbing his nose at the international community.  And this is what most people tend to pass on by when discussing the war that has made Bush, among Americans answering these polls, unpopular to such an extent.  To argue that Hussein was just a bad guy misses the point.  Hussein invaded a neighboring country, raped and pillaged, and basically pissed off the community of nations.  I sometimes wonder if people just forgot that the whole gulf war took place at all. 

Now, those who have actually followed history for the past decade+ know that Hussein was given 17 chances via UN security council resolutions to comply with the demands made to him after the end of the gulf war.  To say that 17 ignored UN resolutions is a lot is an overstatement like no other.  Over the course of 12 years, a brutal man responsible for the deaths of over 1, 000, 000 people (innocents, most of them) thumbed his nose at the world and basically said, ’to hell with you, I’ll do anything I want.’  1441, the resolution that demanded a full accounting of all weapons programs, records of all destroyed munitions, and complete compliance with international inspectors, was the 17th resolution regarding Hussein’s behavior after the 1991 war in Kuwait and Iraq. 

Clearly, the man was never going to step down from his post.  He was never going to be talked into complying with weapons inspections through diplomacy.  12 years is a long time to deal with a man who could threaten his neighbors and any country in reach of chemical and biological weapons.

Unfortunately, many Americans have bought into the liberal lie that Bush lied and people died.  Of course, bipartisan commissions, history, and basic common sense have proven that no one lied, and that every security apparatus in the world agreed- Hussein posed a threat at some level, he had never fully complied with the dozen and a half resolutions, he still had banned munitions that could be used to threaten the free nations of the world, and he was never going to fully comply with inspectors on the ground in any significant manner. 

Bush’s decision to oust a brutal despot who killed 1, 000, 000 people was a noble one.  People, of course, become weary, and they do so quite easily.  But weariness of war doesn’t make the initial decision to oust the man known ’round the world as the butcher a bad one.  It also doesn’t make the man or the mission  he spearheaded a failure.  To decry the decision to oust the thug, one has to offer a better alternative.  The status quo would in no way cut it, and removing all restrictions on the regime would have been a complete failure of moral authority.  Free nations cannot allow brutal thugs to threaten other free nations, sitting idly by doing nothing about the situation.  Sitting on their hands, just waiting for the situation to somehow get better on its own, tho we know in our hearts no such thing will ever happen.  

At the end of the day, it comes down to choices. All of life comes down to decisions.  Allow evil to thrive and people to suffer at the hands of such evil, or remove the evil for good, not allowing it to threaten, maim, or destroy ever again.  A world with Saddam Hussein, the butcher of Baghdad is a better place, and we have men like George Bush to thank for removing him from the scene.  Decisions like that aren’t failures, they’re acts of courage.  Unpopular decisions have to be made, and sometimes that makes for unpopular men.  Unpopularity, though not such a wonderful thing, doesn’t equal failure.