Quote:
Originally posted by svandamme
i'de be laughing if it wasn't so sad to call the carnage over there "noble"
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There was carnage at Thermopylae, where there was also nobility. There was carnage in Iraq before we came. There will be carnage if we leave. On its present trajectory, your continent is headed toward carnage. We are fighting both the potential and form of carnage itself.
With its intention to depose a tyrant, liberate a people, regenerate both the impulse to liberty and the currency of hope in a region suffering the acutest kind of despair -- at such national cost -- a war could not be more noble.
"The young men of little education--earnest displaced villagers with the ways of the countryside showing through their features and dialect and shiny suits--who guarded me through Baghdad, spoke of old terrors, and of the joy and dignity of this new order. Children and nephews and younger brothers of men lost to the terror of the Baath, they are done with the old servitude. They behold the Americans keeping the peace of their troubled land with undisguised gratitude. It hasn't been always brilliant, this campaign waged in Iraq. But its mistakes can never smother its honor, and no apology for it is due the Arab autocrats who had averted their gaze from Iraq's long night of terror under the Baath."
Fouad Ajami, after his recent trip to Iraq.