by Bruce S. Thornton<\/p>\n
Private Papers<\/em><\/p>\n T<\/span>he execution of Saddam Hussein should be a moment of celebration for Americans. Because of the blood and treasure of United States citizens, one of the worst dictators in recent history \u2014 a psychopathic thug with the blood of millions on his hands, a torturer and sadist eager to magnify the scope of his evil by acquiring weapons of mass destruction \u2014 has paid the just price for his crimes. We have shown the world that justice awaits such tyranny and inhumane brutality, that crimes against humanity have consequences. We should be proud.<\/p>\n But, of course, such satisfaction is not the national mood. The fatal failure of nerve afflicting the West \u2014 the disbelief in the rightness and superiority of our own way of life, of the values that will not tolerate monsters like Hussein \u2014 has left us discontented with the brutal costs of enforcing our beliefs. Spoiled by affluence and comfort, we chafe at the tragic constants of violent action: the unforeseen consequences, the mistakes in planning and execution, the inadvertent deaths, the brutality unleashed even in the good when placed in violent and fearful circumstances. These characterize every war, including what we now idealize as the \u201cgood war,\u201d World War II.<\/p>\n B<\/span>ut we were a different people sixty-five years ago, more spiritual, more mature, more confident in the rightness of our beliefs, and thus more accepting of the grim truth that sometimes the good must kill some people now so that the evil don\u2019t kill more people later. No more. We are the therapeutic generation that wants to eat its cake and have it, to achieve all goods without risk or cost or hard trade-offs. We loudly profess our love of freedom, rule by law, human rights, and prosperity as goods all people deserve; we weep for the victims of tyranny and oppression and all who lack such goods; and we chastise our leaders for allowing such misery to flourish. But we don\u2019t want actually to pay the nasty, bloody price of acting on those beliefs and destroying those who don\u2019t respect them.<\/p>\n Rather than acknowledging our own achievements in Iraq, then, and pressing grimly forward to complete the task we began, we whine and snipe and complain about our \u201cfailure,\u201d basing our judgments on impossible standards of perfection that imperfect humans will never meet. Much of this criticism is driven by ideology, of course. The Democrats and the media have opposed this war from the start, and thus have found partisan advantage in casting its progress as in fact a descent into some Vietnam-like \u201cquagmire,\u201d the pre-selected mythic paradigm that instead of the facts has shaped the judgments of most critics.<\/p>\n But even supporters of the war engage in the same sort of criticism. \u201cMore troops,\u201d they cry, yet the point is not the number of troops but what you have them do, and those actions are limited by political constraints, namely our refusal to accept the tragic costs of war. In early 2004 we had enough troops to annihilate Muqtada al-Sadr and his Mahdi militia, but we didn\u2019t, leaving both to grow in power and influence. But consider the outcry that would have attended the necessarily bloody cost of that annihilation \u2014 the footage on CNN, the photos on the front page of the\u00a0New York Times<\/i>, the speeches decrying American brutality. Had that happened, there\u2019s a good chance John Kerry would be president today, and Congress would be entering its third year under Democratic control.<\/p>\n But worse is the constant assertion that the U.S. has \u201cfailed\u201d in Iraq. No one has \u201cfailed\u201d yet, and it is a sign of our collective failure of nerve that we want to quit in the middle of the game. But it is not we who are \u201cfailing.\u201d Hussein and his WMD capacity are gone, and a lethal threat has been removed. If worst comes to worst and Iraq doesn\u2019t stabilize, a fractured Iraq that looks like Lebanon will still be preferable to a regime controlled by a psychotic Saddam Hussein flush with oil money and ultimately freed, as he likely would have been, from U.N. sanctions and weapons inspectors.<\/p>\n T<\/span>he fact is, it is the Iraqi people who are failing, the Arabs who are failing, and Muslims who are failing. The same cultural pathologies that keep Palestinian Arabs sullen welfare clients, that keep Lebanon a political basket-case, that keep millions of Middle-Eastern Muslims mired in poverty and oppression and ignorance and gender apartheid, are the same forces that are keeping Iraqis in some\u00a0Road Warrior<\/i>\u00a0dystopia \u2014 not our blunders, cultural insensitivity, arrogance, or whatever other excuse concocted by self-loathing Americans.<\/p>\n No, Iraq is failing because too many Muslims love sectarian hatred, love resentment and envy of a successful infidel West, and love their belief in their own God-sanctioned superiority and righteousness more than they love freedom, prosperity and human rights. We have spent American lives and money to give Muslim Arabs a chance to create a better life, and they are blowing it, all the while neighboring Muslim nations either sit on their hands or actively support the forces destroying that opportunity.<\/p>\n But a willingness to acknowledge and assert our superiority, despite our flaws, to a culture and religion that validate blowing up and torturing one\u2019s fellows, is sorely lacking even among those who should know better. And that is what emboldens the enemy. He sees our impossible expectations and our utopian standards of action, but to him these are not the signs of the sophisticated, sensitive, \u201cnuanced\u201d sensibility that we fancy we are displaying. Rather, they are the symptoms of cultural weakness and spiritual corruption. So he fights on, confident that more explosions, more grisly footage, more exploitation of false guilt and moral exhaustion will help him prevail.<\/p>\n And if we don\u2019t recover that ardent belief in the superiority of freedom and individual rights \u2014 the same faith that conquered fascist and communist tyranny \u2014 he just may be right.<\/p>\n \u00a92007 Bruce Thornton<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" American confidence necessary to succeed in a war for freedom. by Bruce S. Thornton Private Papers The execution of Saddam Hussein should be a moment of celebration for Americans.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[22,762],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-1qY","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":6606,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/bruce-thornton-on-secure-freedom-radio-with-frank-gaffney\/","url_meta":{"origin":5516,"position":0},"title":"Bruce Thornton on Secure Freedom Radio with Frank Gaffney","author":"victorhanson","date":"October 10, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"Seth Jones, Bruce Thornton, Peter Pham, Diana West October 9th, 2013\u00a0\u00b7\u00a0Comments SETH JONES, Associate Director of the International Security and Defense Policy Center at the RAND Corporation, joins guest host DAN BONGINO, to help explain the terror threat from and historical background of the terrorist organization al-Shabaab. BRUCE THORNTON, a\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Bruce S. Thornton"","block_context":{"text":"Bruce S. Thornton","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/our-contributors\/bruce-s-thornton\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":5363,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/spitzers-comic-fall\/","url_meta":{"origin":5516,"position":1},"title":"Spitzer’s Comic Fall","author":"victorhanson","date":"April 1, 2008","format":false,"excerpt":"The understand the disgraced governor, brush up your Aristophanes. by Bruce S. Thornton City Journal Commentators are already calling the rise and fall of New York governor Eliot Spitzer \u201ctragic.\u201d The tragic arc, as the old Greeks articulated it, goes something like this: talent and drive lead to success, but\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Bruce S. Thornton"","block_context":{"text":"Bruce S. Thornton","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/our-contributors\/bruce-s-thornton\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":5524,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/holy-wisdom\/","url_meta":{"origin":5516,"position":2},"title":"Holy Wisdom","author":"victorhanson","date":"December 7, 2007","format":false,"excerpt":"Why the Pope should call for the return of the Hagia Sophia by Bruce S. Thornton Private Papers Many in the West are congratulating Pope Benedict XVI\u2019s recent trip to Turkey, where in the Blue Mosque he prayed facing Mecca and made other gestures meant to salve the wounds raised\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Bruce S. Thornton"","block_context":{"text":"Bruce S. Thornton","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/our-contributors\/bruce-s-thornton\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":5393,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/epistle-to-the-muslims\/","url_meta":{"origin":5516,"position":3},"title":"Epistle to the Muslims","author":"victorhanson","date":"November 27, 2007","format":false,"excerpt":"Christian leaders abase themselves before Islam by Bruce S. Thornton City Journal On November 18, the\u00a0New York Times\u00a0ran a full-page ad entitled \u201cA Christian Response to\u00a0A Common Word Between Us and You.\u201d\u00a0A Common Word\u00a0is an October letter from 138 Muslim scholars and clerics \u201cto leaders of Christian churches, everywhere.\u201d It\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Bruce S. Thornton"","block_context":{"text":"Bruce S. Thornton","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/our-contributors\/bruce-s-thornton\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":602,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-medias-racial-prison\/","url_meta":{"origin":5516,"position":4},"title":"The Media’s Racial Prison","author":"victorhanson","date":"July 31, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce Thornton Frontpage Magazine Two incidents last week suggest once more that our confused, hypocritical, and politicized notions of race and relations will play a huge role in the presidential election. In the first, Virginia state senator L. Louise Lucas, part of Obama\u2019s \u201cTruth Team\u201d campaigning for the president\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Bruce S. Thornton"","block_context":{"text":"Bruce S. 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