The images were stunning – the U.S. Marines rolled into Baghdad virtually unopposed. While U.S. Marines mingled with jubilant Iraqis, another group of Iraqis set about trying to topple a massive statue of Saddam Hussein.
They set up a ladder, climbed the 30 or so feet to the base of the massive pedestal as the crowd below set up a rope.
The cameras captured the highly symbolic scene of Saddam Hussein, with a noose around his neck, with hordes of freshly liberated Baghdad residents pulling on the other end.
As the coalition rumbled across Iraq, the media pointed to the unexpectedly fierce resistance put up by Iraqi forces as proof the United States was being greeted as the ruthless invading crusaders the media said it was, rather than the liberating force Washington repeatedly said it was.
But as each town fell, the resistance evaporated. Many of the battlefield survivors joined the crowds cheering the columns of Marines before surrendering to the troops bringing up the rear.
That’s when we learned the reason for the resistance. Saddam’s forces rounded up wives and children of Iraqi men conscripted to the battle. They were told that if they surrendered or were captured, their families would be killed. U.S. forces were baffled by waves of suicide attacks in which men driving Toyota pickups would simply drive into the sides of Bradley fighting vehicles, knowing they could not possibly damage them.
Those “defenders” were not “attacking” the Americans – they were simply dying in battle to save their families. Once the Marines liberated their families, so did the resistance.
Still, opposition to the war continues, but it grows increasingly obvious that the opposition isn’t to the war itself, but to the United States. Nobody is going to march under banners decrying the “invasion of Iraq” anymore.
On Fox News, on Wednesday, cameras caught Iraqis carrying a banner of their own, reading, “Human Shields Go Home.”
They can’t argue “no blood for oil” anymore. It is obvious to any thinking person that this war was conducted with the least amount of unnecessary bloodshed in human history.
U.S. weapons designers developed a precision guided 2,000-pound block of cement that it used to take out tanks and armored vehicles in urban areas in order to prevent collateral damage.
Blood? Not much, apart from that of the enemy during combat.
The anti-war argument that Washington waged this war to benefit its economic allies is pitifully transparent. America is the richest nation in the world. If all we wanted was cheaper oil, we could have simply lifted restrictions on Iraq’s oil exports until it was as cheap as we wanted it to be.
The French, German and Russian argument that America abandoned diplomacy just when the inspections were starting to work collapsed as soon as the war began.
U.S. and British forces have uncovered more evidence of Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction in three weeks than the U.N. inspection regimes have in 13 years.
Thousands of chemical suits and atropine injectors of German manufacture. Thousands of French radios at Iraqi command posts like the one in the hospital where Pfc. Lynch was rescued. Huge caches of French, Russian and Jordanian weapons discovered at a huge PLO training camp inside Iraq.
Diplomacy and inspections would not have worked, but it would have allowed Saddam to stay in power – and for the lucrative black-market trade to continue. This war wasn’t about benefiting George Bush’s economic friends. Continuing U.N. sanctions and allowing the woefully incompetent Hans Blix to oversee weapons inspections were all about benefiting Saddam’s Russian, French and German friends – not about the Iraqis.
The real beneficiaries of the war were seen flocking to downtown Baghdad tugging on the noose around the neck of Saddam’s statue.
