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Real Answers™
tf28
Copyright: © 2004 Tom Flannery
700 words

THE RIGHTNESS OF OUR CAUSE

By: Tom Flannery

As we head into the heart of a presidential election, it seems clear that the central question for many this coming November will be the war in Iraq. In the wake of intelligence failures, Abu Ghraib, and the success of Michael Moore's anti-war documentary "Fahrenheit 9/11," millions of Americans are wondering if we did the right thing and whether it will all be worth it in the end.

Unfortunately, the negative-news-only coverage this war has gotten from most of the media has only intensified such concerns and emboldened the nay-sayers. We have had endless stories and photos of abuses at Abu Ghraib prison, yet we have hardly heard or seen anything of the horrific torture videos shot while Saddam Hussein was still in power.

Such one-sided coverage can't help but make Americans feel like it is our own forces who are the bad guys in Iraq -- this despite the fact that the Abu Ghraib abuses were committed by just seven soldiers, all of whom are being punished. Saddam's torturers, rapists and murderers, on the other hand, were all acting under the auspices of the state and never would have been brought to justice if not for U.S. intervention.

This is a perspective that is almost totally missing from what has been called the "mainstream" news. Not only are all of the accomplishments of our heroic military being overlooked in freeing a country from the shackles of tyranny and barbarism, but the very conditions in which they lived under Saddam is now being whitewashed.

In Moore's documentary, for instance, Iraq under Saddam is portrayed as something of a Disney World where life simply couldn't have been better until American bombs started falling. Not a word is said of Saddam's wanton slaughter of hundreds of thousands of his own people or his many other crimes against humanity: his torture chambers, his rape rooms, his mass graves, his use of chemical weapons against his own people and the Iranians, the invasions of Iran and Kuwait, and so on. No, the only evils committed in Iraq, we're told by Moore and his fellow travelers in politics and the media, have been perpetrated by America.

Nor are we told anything about his terrorist ties. In fact, when the 9/11 Commission concluded that there was no evidence of a collaboration between Saddam and al-Qaeda on 9/11, much of the media misreported it by claiming there were no ties whatsoever between the two. Yet even the commission members, Republicans and Democrats alike, acknowledged that there were ties between them going back over a decade.

Take Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a killer who was part of a terror group linked to al-Qaeda and who fought against America in Afghanistan following the 9/11 attacks. Al-Zarqawi was wounded there and later treated at a hospital in Baghdad run by one of Saddam's psychopathic sons. Then al-Zarqawi took over a terrorist group in Iraq which killed a U.S. official, and he is personally responsible for scores of terrorist attacks against coalition forces in Iraq since the U.S. launched a campaign to liberate that long-oppressed country.

But al-Zarqawi is just one piece in a large body of evidence of Saddam's terror ties, such as his $25,000 payments to the families of homicide bomber terrorists in Israel, his harboring of terrorists like Abu Nidal and those involved in the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993, and his attempted assassination of Pres. George H.W. Bush (our current president's father) that same year.

Then there are certain religious groups who claim it was wrong to invade Iraq because war is always immoral. Yet Scripture tells us that God Himself is "a man of war" (Ex. 15:3) and that there is "a time of war" (Eccl. 3:8). And if ever there was a time for war, it was against the ruthless and barbaric regime of Saddam Hussein, one of history's most diabolical despots who showed time and again he was a threat not only to the safety of Israel and the stability of the Middle East, but to our own national security (weapons of mass destruction or not).

Even if the media and the Michael Moores of the world just don't get it.

"Real Answers™" furnished courtesy of The Amy Foundation Internet Syndicate. To contact the author or The Amy Foundation, write or E-mail to: P. O. Box 16091, Lansing, MI 48901-6091; amyfoundtn@aol.com

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