Say Anything Blog

You know those pictures of anti-war protesters you see holding signs that say things like “not one more death?”  (Click here, scroll)  One wonders how many of them contemplate the consequences of a premature withdrawal from Iraq.

Do they think, upon the exit of our troops, Iraq will become a happy fun zone where children fly kites and every lives in peace?  Because reality doesn’t quite jibe with that rather naive view of the situation, and the Iraqi leadership knows it:

  Iraq’s foreign minister said Tuesday that he believes his country has averted a civil war after five years of “tears and blood,” and warned that an abrupt U.S. troop withdrawal would be disastrous.

  Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari told The Associated Press that mistakes had been made by all sides but Iraq has reached a turning point.

  “These past five years I think were full of hopes and promises but also of tears and blood … and we’ve gone through a very, very difficult transformation,” said Zebari, a Kurd who has held his post in each successive Iraqi administration since the U.S.-led invasion on March 20, 2003.

  He noted that the Iraqis had established a government and gained freedoms that were absent under nearly three decades of Saddam Hussein’s rule, despite violence that has killed tens of thousands of Iraqis and nearly 4,000 U.S. troops.

That last line from the AP is a little unfair.  Yes, winning victory from Saddam and keeping that victory out of the hands of extremist groups has cost both America and Iraqis plenty.  But how many people died under Saddam Hussein?  Millions.

We here a lot of talk about how Darfur is such a horrible humanitarian crisis, and for good reason.  But it’s worth noting that Iraq under Saddam Hussein was every but the humanitarian crisis Darfur is now, but few on the oh-so-compassionate left seem willing to acknowledge that fact.