3) Read this elegantly and angrily written overview of the situation in Iraq by Victor Davis Hanson. (I still can’t get over the fact that I link to National Review Online, but Hanson’s a very different animal than, say, John Derbyshire. I also saw him talking about the Battle of Thermopylae (of Frank Miller’s 300 fame) on the Discovery Channel the other night, so that’s neat.)
4) Buy the stunning anthology of Christopher Hitchens’s Slate columns on Iraq, A Long Short War: The Postponed Liberation of Iraq. He gets into the highest dudgeon I’ve ever seen him get into in the book’s conclusion, aiming a furious j’accuse at Saddam enablers everywhere, from the first Bush administration to the current “peace” movement:
QUOTE: “Those twelve years [between Gulf Wars I & II] were eaten by the locusts. The trunk of the tree of Iraq as allowed to rot, and its branches to wither. And all the time, a huge and voracious maggot lay at the heart of the state. Trade turned into a racket, the market was monopolized by the Mafiosi, the sanctions screwed the poor and fattened the rich, and palaces with gold shit-houses were constructed to mock the slum dwellers and the conscripts. A class of lumpen, uneducated, resentful losers was bred. When the Great Leader wanted to be popular, as on the grand occasion of his last referendum, he declared amnesty of the thieves, rapists and murderers who were his natural constituency. (The political detainees stayed where they were, or are: It will take years for us to find and number all their graves.) To his very last day, the Maggot continued to divide and rule: to pump gangrene and pus into the society, disseminating lies and fear and junky religious propaganda. And there his bastard children were, when the opportunity for hectic destruction and saturnalia presented itself. If it is truly possible to be wise after the event, then I associate myself again with those who believe that the Saddam Hussein regime should have been deposed in 1991. There would have been some severe moments, but Iraq would now be twelve years into the process of nation-building (or rebuilding) and many unlived or blighted lives could have been lived in the risky atmosphere of self-determination.
“I stress the element of risk because it so often seemed to me, before the battle was joined, that many of its critics were demanding the impossible. Assure us of a painless victory, they said, and we might consider lending our support. Assure us, also, of an immaculate conception of the project, unspotted by any previous compromises and betrayals. Assure us above all that oil is an unmentionalbe bodily secretion, unfit for discussion in polite company. I grew impatient with this. As Frederick Douglass once phrased it, those who want liberty without a fight are asking for the beauty of the ocean without the roar of the storm. (It’s been put more terseley more recently: ‘No Justice–No Peace.’)”
This guy hates totalitarianism, and I mean hates it. And he has nothing but contempt for excuses for its perpetuation. Is there really any other way to live?
Happy Fourth, once again!