The Latest Iraq War justification from the Wall Street Journal Editorial page today:
But there is a broader lesson here. We tend to forget for all of Iraq's current troubles the US and its allies deposed a dictator whose methods and purposes are eerily similar to those of the Nazis even when it came to a comparatively small massacre such as the one in Dujail. That is something in which Americans can take justifiable pride ...
What is Dujail?
More below the fold:
The WSJ continues:
... 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 Mohammed...
...Of Mr Mohammed'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...
... They gunned down Lidice's 173 men in groups of 10, shipped the women to Ravensbruck concentration camp and deported the remaining children to Germany...
"If future generations ask us what we are fighting for" said US Navy Secretary Frank Knox, "we shall tell them the story of Lidice"
The WSJ concludes this remarkable editorial by quoting a poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay:
Ask Yourself, ask yourself: What have we done?
Who after all, are we?
That we should sit at ease in the sun,
The only country, the only one,
Unmolested and free?
But who should tell whom the story of My Lai?
...Soon the killing began. The first victim was a man stabbed in the back with a bayonet. Then a middle-aged man was picked up, thrown down a well, and a grenade lobbed in after him. A group of fifteen to twenty mostly older women were gathered around a temple, kneeling and praying. They were all executed with shots to the back of their heads. Eighty or so villagers were taken from their homes and herded to the plaza area. As many cried "No VC! No VC!", Calley told soldier Paul Meadlo, "You know what I want you to do with them". .... Meadlo and Calley began firing into the group from a distance of ten to fifteen feet. The few that survived did so because they were covered by the bodies of those less fortunate....
...Once Haeberle focused his camera on a young child about five feet away, but before he could get his picture the kid was blown away. He angered some GIs as he tried to photograph them as they fondled the breasts of a fifteen-year-old Vietnamese girl....
...At one point, a two-year-old child who somehow survived the gunfire began running towards the hamlet. Calley grabbed the child, threw him back in the ditch, then shot him.
...
What triggered the massacres of Lidice, Dujail and My Lai?
Lidice
The bodies of the men and boys over age 16 of Lidice, Czechoslovakia, murdered by the Nazis on June 10, 1942, in reprisal for the assassination of SS Leader Reinhard Heydrich.
Dujail
In July 1982, Saddam Hussein was nearly killed there (at Dujail) when gunmen opened fire on his motorcade. The dictator's reprisal came swiftly
My Lai
On March 14, a small squad from "C" Company ran into a booby trap, killing a popular sergeant, blinding one GI and wounding several others. The following evening, when a funeral service was held for the killed sergeant, soldiers had revenge on their mind.
If Dujail makes Saddam a Nazi because of Lidice, what does My Lai make us?
The Wall Street Journal did not say