Silver Lining, No Cloud

“Go to the mirror boy” – Ralph Peters:

Bashir Assad, Kim Jong-Il, Robert Mugabe, the old mullahs in Teheran, the Saudi royal family, the already cowering Moammar Khadafy – and that would-be caliph of all Muslims, Osama bin Laden . . . all of the dictators, authoritarian rulers and terrorists-who-would-be-king saw their own faces in the place of Saddam’s.

….Stand back and consider anew the greatness of what America and her partners have done. For the first time, the forces of freedom refused to wait for a dictator to strike again, whether against us or against his own people. Defying former allies comfortable with the old pattern of embracing cooperative tyrants, we changed the global rules.

And freedom won.

Call me just a big, fat, stupid, shit-for-brains, polyanna, rose-colored, gullible, credulous, nattering nincompoop, but to me, this is all pretty fucking great.

As the image of a humbled Saddam flashed on millions of screens, thousands of years of the armed few tyrannizing the suffering masses came to a symbolic end. And America stood taller than it has since the spring of 1945.

And what must we do to prove our bona fides, our sincerity, our good will?

When Saddam raises – as he will – the support Americans once provided to him, we should go him one better and make every record available to the court.

We Americans must always have the courage to stand up and admit it when we’ve made mistakes. We must resist the temptation to classify the details of this long-ago visit by special envoy X or that covert aid during the Iran-Iraq War. Just tell the truth.

Because the truth will set us free, and will prove that we are confident and secure enough that we can admit mistakes, and do our very best to rectify them, as we have gone a long way toward doing in Iraq.