A Star Tribune cartoon, as republished Saturday in the Washington Post, has six panels, which surely capture the ethos of our time:
The first is 1991, when Uncle Sam tells the U.N.: “Saddam’s violated the Gulf War truce by not disarming.” To which the U.N. replies: “Give him more time.”
Next panel is 1994
Uncle Sam: “Saddam’s still not disarming.” U.N.: “Wait.”
Next panel: 1998
Uncle Sam: “He’s kicked out the inspectors.”
U.N.: “Have patience.”
Next Panel: 2001
Uncle Sam: “Now he’s building more weapons!”
U.N.: “We’ll draft another resolution.”
Next Panel: 2002
Uncle Sam: “He’s still not disarming.”
U.N.: “Give it time.”
Final Panel: 2003
Uncle Sam: “We have to disarm him before it’s too late.”
U.N.: “What’s your hurry?”
On Sunday, in the Azores, with the leaders of Portugal, Spain and the United Kingdom, our president brought a decisive end to this outrageous and very dangerous farce.
He said: “Tomorrow is a moment of truth for the world” – meaning that Saddam Hussein has one more day to leave Iraq and go into exile or we will militarily take him out. On Monday night, Bush says he’s got to be gone in 48 hours.
President Bush went on to say: “On this very day 15 years ago, Saddam Hussein launched a chemical-weapons attack on the Iraqi village of Halabja. For the single order, the Iraqi regime killed thousands of men, women and children, without mercy or shame. Saddam Hussein has proven he is capable of any crime. We must not permit his crimes to reach across the world.
“Saddam Hussein has a history of mass murder. He possesses the weapons of mass murder. He agrees – he agreed – to disarm Iraq of these weapons as a condition for ending the Gulf War over a decade ago. United Nations Security Council, in Resolution 1441, has declared Iraq in material breach of its longstanding obligations, demanding once again Iraq’s full and immediate disarmament, and promised serious consequences if the regime refused to comply. That resolution was passed unanimously and its logic is inescapable. The Iraqi regime will disarm itself, or the Iraqi regime will be disarmed by force. And the regime has not disarmed itself.”
Two days earlier, in Baghdad’s Mother Of All Battles Mosque chief Imam Abdel Razzaq al-Saadi said the following in his sermon which was broadcast by Iraqi state television:
“It is the duty of Muslims today, Iraqi and others, to threaten American interests wherever they are, to set them on fire and sink their ships. This is jihad in the name of God … Oh God, make Bush and Blair drown!”
This was reported by wire services and the Washington Times Saturday morning. There has been no public repudiation from any U.S. or foreign Islamic leader or groups of mosques, in a religion that President Bush recurrently and very regrettably claims is “a religion of peace.”
The community-affairs director of (the Saudi Arabian-funded propaganda organization) the Council on American-Islamic Relations, Bassem Khafagi, has been arrested by the FBI, reports the Associated Press on charges of violating U.S. immigration laws, bank fraud and funneling money to activities supporting terrorism.
In Washington, D.C., on Saturday, there was an anti-war rally that began at the foot of the Washington Monument. Most appropriately, this rally was addressed by one of the most notorious anti-American Americans of the last three decades: Ramsey Clark.
In Winston Churchill’s “The Gathering Storm,” he wrote: “Still, if you will not fight for the right when you can easily win without bloodshed; if you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not too costly; you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance of survival. There may even be a worse case, you may have to fight when there is no hope of victory because it is better to perish than to live as slaves.”
On Dec. 26, 1941, three weeks after most of our Pacific fleet had been sunk at Pearl Harbor, after our country had been so badly divided by “America First” isolationists, who kept us so under-armed, Prime Minister Churchill, in an address to the Congress, said: “He must indeed have a blind soul who cannot see that some great purpose and design is being worked out here below, of which we have the honor to be the faithful servants.”
“It is not given to us to peer into the mysteries of the future. Still, I avow my hope and faith – sure and inviolate – that in the days to come, the British and American people will for their own safety, and for the good of all, walk together in majesty, in justice and in peace.”
