Great article written in today’s WSJ which correctly compares the Hitler ordered massacre of the town of Lidice with Saddam’s ordered massacre at Dujail:?
In the late spring of 1942, the world learned the name Lidice. Czech resistance had assassinated deputy SS chief Reinhard Heydrich in Prague, and Adolf Hitler ordered Heydrich’s successor to “wade through blood” to find the killers. Nearly 2,000 innocent civilians were murdered by the Nazis without turning up the culprits. So the decision was made to obliterate an entire village, so that the world would know the price of Nazi blood.
On the evening of June 10, German troops sealed off the Czech mining village of Lidice, chosen because two of its native sons were serving in Britain’s Royal Air Force. They gunned down Lidice’s 173 men in groups of 10, shipped the women to the Ravensbruck concentration camp and deported some of the remaining children to Germany.
Next the Germans had the village razed, its graves dug up and its rubble buried. Finally, they proudly broadcast the details of what they had done. The world got the message. “If future generations ask us what we are fighting for,” said U.S. Navy Secretary Frank Knox, “we shall tell them the story of Lidice.”
Fast forward 40 years and to another village, this one called Dujail, in Iraq. In July 1982, Saddam Hussein was nearly killed there when gunmen opened fire on his motorcade. The dictator’s reprisal came swiftly: That night, security forces arrested 350 villagers, including 15-year-old Ahmad Hassan Mohammad. “They blindfolded me,” Mr. Mohammad recalled while testifying during Saddam’s trial in Baghdad last December. “But I was so young, it [the blindfold] kept falling.”
He described seeing “a machine that looked like a grinder and had some blood and hair [on it and] I saw bodies of people from Dujail.” Of Mr. Mohammad’s 10 brothers, seven were murdered by Saddam’s henchmen, along with 141 others from Dujail.
As with Lidice, Dujail was razed and its orchards bulldozed. Also like Lidice, the purpose of the massacre was not to dispense justice but to make an example of the villagers. “You people of Dujail, we have disciplined Iraq through you,” Mr. Mohammad recalled one of the torturers saying.
[…]But there’s a broader lesson here. We tend to forget that, for all of Iraq’s current troubles, the U.S. and its allies deposed a dictator whose methods and purposes were eerily similar to those of the Nazis, even when it came to a comparatively small massacre such as the one in Dujail. That’s something in which Americans can take justifiable pride, as much as the World War II generation did in defeating the Nazis. And it’s something to which critics of the war, at least those who profess sincere concern with human rights, ought to give some thought.
Quite interesting how the left will ignore the fact that Saddam was comparable to Hitler in many ways, and how the very fact that we took him out was a GOOD thing.? Just as taking Hitler out was a GOOD thing.? For Iraq, and for the world.?
But the left wanted to appease Saddam prior to our invasion, just as the left wanted to appease Hitler in 1939.??
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It’s good to see that somebody gets it. I wonder what would have happened if today’s liberals were around in the WW2 era? They’d call Roosevelt a war criminal for attacking Germany when it was the Japanese behind the attack at Pearl Harbor.
It’s funny when those on the left give the obligatory “Of course he was a brutal dictator- I don’t support him” as a lead in before giving their talking points list of “no wmds” and why we shouldn’t have removed him from power and how President Bush is Hitler. And I often also hear “those who fail to study their history are doomed to repeat it”…as if history is supporting their side. They are the ones who fail to interpret and come away with the right lessons from history books. They think the Jane Fondas and the anti-war peace activists of the 60’s made the world better, failing to acknowledge the repercussions of our pullout and abandonment of our allies in Vietnam. They like to fashion themselves champions of human rights…you’d think they’d be happy Saddam has been removed and brutal regimes repressive toward women and gays such as the Taliban, overthrown. But no. They’d rather self-flagellate and self-loathe America as the grossest human rights violator and fight for the rights of death row inmates and terrorist enemy combatants at Abu Ghraib and Gitmo.