Posted by
The Eagle's Quill on Monday, September 11, 2006 2:38:10 PM
I guess it was too much to expect that an
opinion piece in
The Shield (USI student newspaper) for the run-up to the fifth anniversary to 9/11 would rise any where to the level of
today's editorial insights of left-wing journalist Christopher Hitchens.
Instead we are treated to an incoherent and rambling discourse taking us from Lebanon to Iraq with the requisite smart-mouthed remarks about the President peppered here and there.
Ironically, the Lebanon-Iraq orbit in which the USI opinion writer was erratically traveling provides an insight into the importance of the liberation of Iraq from Saddam Hussein. (Iraqi liberation has been
official US policy since 1998).
This past summer, the Middle East was an absolute powder keg with Hamas attacks and kidnappings and then more seriously with Hezbollah kidnappings and missile attacks from Lebanon on Israel. It was believed by many that the Middle East was on the verge of a major war. If Saddam Hussein had been in power, he alone, or in conjunction with his ally Syria (already assisting Hezbollah), could have launched a scud missile attack on Israel.
Saddam Hussein had a history of
scud missile attacks on Israel that goes back to the first Gulf War in 1991. During that war, 39 missiles launched from Iraq hit Israel, some of them landing in populated areas. Unfortunately, the US Air Force was never able to knock out any scud launchers pointed at Israel, because the Iraqis would quickly hide them after firing the missiles. Israel was on the verge of responding militarily, but the Gulf War quickly came to an end.
If Hussein had not been deposed and Iraq liberated in 2003, the possibility of Hussein again shooting missiles into this tinderbox would have been a real possibility. As we now know, Hussein still had scud missiles and used them
against Kuwait at the beginning of the Iraq War. We also know that sanctions were crumbling against Iraq at that time.
But Saddam Hussein and his scud missiles were never a factor in the Middle East battles this summer. So a huge Middle East conflagration may very well have been avoided because President Bush carried out what has been US policy since 1998: the liberation of Iraq.
To be sure more needs to be done. As Christopher Hitchens puts it very directly concerning the war on Islamo-Fascism, “’We’ –and our allies—simply have to become more ruthless and more experienced.”
-posted by Glen Kissel.