Saturday, January 06, 2007

Sympathy For The Devil

**LINK**
So it appears Saddam did indeed have a few friends in Europe who weren't French.
Get over it. Saddam is dead. He was successfully hanged. It's not necessarily a bad thing.

Protests such as these really make a mockery of Europe and it's 'progressive' sensibilities. Take Italy, which is upset with the hanging of Saddam, and have called for a worldwide moratorium on the death penalty.
Italians, for all their faults, used to be a fairly commonsensical people. Apparently, all the proper-minded Italians have left for a distant shore.


Yes, this is the same nation that didn't seem to have any reservations with how they dealt with their own asshole dictator not all that long ago. But I guess that was different, wasn't it? It's always a different standard for 'progressives' than the one they want everybody else to follow.
And I don't remember anybody lighting up national landmarks calling for a 'moratorium' on killing when it was Saddam gassing Kurds and executing dissenters.

I have a better idea. Let's call for a worldwide moratorium on graft, bribery, and kleptocratic governments. You think Italy will be on board for that one?

4 comments:

Mercy Now said...

The truth of the matter is that if these types of people experienced what Saddam did to others, they would not be protesting. The same goes for the war protestors and peace activists. Yes, we all want peace but when there are dictators who have no interest in peace but destruction, then they need to be stopped. What the "peace" activists failed to see is to distinguish between good and evil.

Andy said...

The reason you don't remember anyone lighting up national landmarks when Saddam was gassing the Kurds or executing his own dissidents is because Ronald Reagan was President and Saddam was our buddy. In fact, that famous picture from 1983 of Rumsfeld shaking Saddam's hand in Baghdad was taken when we knew full well that he was using chemical weapons on innocent civilians. He was our guy, back then, even though he was as slimy as ever. We decided he was less threatening than the Ayatollah, and since he didn't like the Ayatollah, either, we decided to back him. That was one of the most enraging things about the whole WMD bullshit: Cheney and Rumsfeld (and Bush pere) were in the government back in the 80s when WE SOLD Saddam the chemical components and other weapons to use against Iran. Now for them to be so outraged that he was possessing them, well, that was the rankest, grossest hypocrisy ever. And then he didn't even have them. Saddam was less of a liar than our own president. Swell. But I'm sure if you did some research, you would find plenty of people here and in Europe who were outraged by Saddam back in the 1980s, and they weren't the Republicans.

Now, as to this execution business. One, most industrialized nations have concluded executions are barbaric. The United States keeps company with havens of civil liberty like Russia, China, Saudi Arabia and North Korea in this regard.

Two, even if you feel that capital punishment should be a legitimate tool in a government anti-crime arsenal, it should be, as the NY Times put it in a recent editorial, "dispassionate." What happened to Saddam -- and no, I don't feel any sympathy for him -- was that he was turned over to a vengeful Shiite lynch mob. Vengeance and justice are not the same thing. Actually, they are opposites. Far from the act of closure that it could have been, it just intensified the sectarian conflict which is tearing that country apart.

Three: it was worth 3,000 American lives and counting, tens of thousands of Iraqi lives and counting, and billions of dollars just to put a noose around this guy's neck?

Gino said...

andy: geopolitics is messy. so what's new? didnt you support clinton's election, even after he fried the retard guy in AR during the campaign to make a point?
and will you support hilary over any GOPer this time,even though she was an integral part of the campaign that fried the retard guy?
all politics is messy...

but did italy actually believe saddam's life would be spared after the regime change that they themselves supported?

do you really think saddam being hanged differently would have defused the sectarian conflict that had been going on over there for centuries?

saddam's death a foregone conclusion as long as he refused to seek exile. he knew it. we knew it. they all knew it.

Gino said...

mercy: we all want peace. just some of humanity are foolish enough to believe its always possible.