"(note: this isn't funny. And it's political, and so should be replaced by one of the other members of ATF soon. But I have a need)


Just a few hours ago, I watched a live webcast of a joint effort by US military and Iraqi nationals to pull down a statue of Saddam Hussein. In the middle of Baghdad. Quite frankly, I was moved, nearly to tears. For a slew of reasons, I suppose - The hundreds of civilians dancing around the fallen statue and hugging US servicemen, the knowledge that the heaviest fighting is probably over (even though it's not perfectly safe now, nor will it be for a while), the fact that hundreds of torture chambers and execution rooms will go unused, the release of over a hundred political prisoners from a childs prison, the picture I have right now on my desktop of an Iraqi girl holding a US flag...

But most of all, I was moved by the fact that once again, America is sucessful in our quest to do the right thing. Say what you will about the motivations of the US government to do what we did - prattle on that it's a Zionist conspiracy, an economic ploy, a misdirection, a result of alien mind control, or whatever other nonsense Indymedia is spouting. But what we did was remove a fascist dictator from power, and brought down one of the most repressive regimes in the world today; a regime that ranks (I'm sorry, I'm ecstatically happy to mean ranked) pretty high on a list of organizations inimical to human rights and international safety. So continue your protests and marches (they make me happy, to be honest; they remind me that such behavior is protected in this country, unlike the regime they implicitly support). But do me a personal favor and take a moment to give thanks that, even if you think we did it for the wrong reasons, we found it necessary to do. Give thanks that, even if only as a side effect, there will be no chance of another genocide by the Iraqi military, no chance that Brown Shirts (or the Ba'athist equivalent) will spirit political dissidents off the street never to be seen again, and a good chance that one day Iraq will be able to join with America in our quest to do what's right, even in the midst of overwhelming opposition."