"Nobody likes to be bombed. Why is this perpetually a surprise?"
I think it's only too easy to be glib and forget what the experience must be like for those who have lived amongst falling bombs, whether in Baghdad or anywhere else.
If I lived under a vicious dictator then I would be delighted to see him gone, even if the future was uncertain. I would even recognise that I owed thanks to those who removed him. However, being human, if I had spent three weeks in fear of my life, with air raids every night and the constant threat of death, if I had lost my son or daughter to one of those bombs, then think I just might have mixed emotions rather than unadulterated gratitude.
This is why I think the 'why aren't they more grateful' question is crazy, and one asked only by those who view events only in theoretical terms without considering that those involved are not simply actors on a set amongst some expensive SFX, but real people, with real lives, and real emotions.
In response to the comments that anti-war protestors do not demonstrate against Hussein.
There are many people and organisations who have been protesting the violence that Saddam Hussein does to his own people. They have been doing it for years. Decades. They have been protesting about his human rights violations long before our governments jumped on that train. Protesting about them to whom?
To our governments, by and large, in order to try to persuade them to stop supporting Hussein diplomatically. To persuade them to stop selling Hussein materials to better equip his army. To stop them sending service personnel to train parts of his army. To persuade them not to send Rumsfeld to shake Hussein's hand in the eighties, when the man had already been responsible for the use of chemical weapons, to persuade them not to give Hussein lines of credit to buy military equipment, as the UK government did, when it already knew that he was a barbarous murderer.
Sadly, those governments did not listen. But that did not mean that there were not people protesting. I think it's more illuminating to turn the question around to those who are hawks now, who wave the flag of Saddam's brutality at every opportunity to justify the war: where were *you* twenty years ago when he was killing and torturing his own people? Where were *your* voices of protest then?
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2004 | 1 |
| 2003 | 2 |
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