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Saddam's Lidice: the dictator's trial reveals a telling historical parallel.
Wall Street Journal EFL; go read it all.In the late spring of 1942, the world learned the name Lidice. Czech resistance had assassinated deputy SS chief Reinhard Heydrich in Prague, and Adolf Hitler ordered Heydrich's successor to "wade through blood" to find the killers. Nearly 2,000 innocent civilians were murdered by the Nazis without turning up the culprits. So the decision was made to obliterate an entire village, so that the world would know the price of Nazi blood. On the evening of June 10, German troops sealed off the Czech mining village of Lidice, chosen because two of its native sons were serving in Britain's Royal Air Force. They gunned down Lidice's 173 men in groups of 10, shipped the women to the Ravensbruck concentration camp and deported some of the remaining children to Germany. Next the Germans had the village razed, its graves dug up and its rubble buried. Finally, they proudly broadcast the details of what they had done. The world got the message. "If future generations ask us what we are fighting for," said U.S. Navy Secretary Frank Knox, "we shall tell them the story of Lidice." Fast forward 40 years and to another village, this one called Dujail, in Iraq. In July 1982, Saddam Hussein was nearly killed there when gunmen opened fire on his motorcade. The dictator's reprisal came swiftly: That night, security forces arrested 350 villagers, including 15-year-old Ahmad Hassan Mohammad. . . . Of Mr. Mohammad's 10 brothers, seven were murdered by Saddam's henchmen, along with 141 others from Dujail. As with Lidice, Dujail was razed and its orchards bulldozed. Also like Lidice, the purpose of the massacre was not to dispense justice but to make an example of the villagers. "You people of Dujail, we have disciplined Iraq through you," Mr. Mohammad recalled one of the torturers saying. Now come to the present. Last week, Saddam acknowledged in court that he had ordered the summary trial that led to the execution of the villagers and the destruction of their farmland. "Where is the crime?" he asked, claiming that as president of Iraq all his actions were lawful. Nazi defendants at the Nuremberg trial famously adopted a similar defense. . . . . . . We tend to forget that, for all of Iraq's current troubles, the U.S. and its allies deposed a dictator whose methods and purposes were eerily similar to those of the Nazis, even when it came to a comparatively small massacre such as the one in Dujail. That's something in which Americans can take justifiable pride, as much as the World War II generation did in defeating the Nazis. And it's something to which critics of the war, at least those who profess sincere concern with human rights, ought to give some thought. . . . The John Murthas and John Kerrys and Cindy Sheehansand Pat Buchanans need to be repeatedly reminded of this--whatever your intentions in opposing the war, you are as a matter of objective fact approving and enabling (in the pop psychology sense of being Saddam's "enabler") the massacare of Dujail. Posted by: Mike 2006-03-08 |
| http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=144839 |