It's True: 'Liberals' Wanted Saddam to Beat U.S.

Gary Kamiya, executive editor of the left-leaning Internet journal Salon, confirms what some Americans have suspected: Liberals were cheering for the enemy in Iraq, the Washington Times pointed out today in an item headlined "Cheering the enemy." "I have a confession: I have at times, as the war has unfolded, secretly wished for things to go wrong," Kamiya wrote. "Wished for the Iraqis to be more nationalistic, to resist longer. Wished for the Arab world to rise up in rage. Wished for all the things we feared would happen. I'm not alone: A number of serious, intelligent, morally sensitive people who oppose the war have told me they have had identical feelings."But surely, you object, these "serious, intelligent, morally sensitive" liberals couldn't possibly favor a mass-murdering, torture-loving dictator? Surely they couldn't agree with "Latino studies" assistant professor Nicholas De Genova, who told a cheering crowd of appeasement activists at Columbia University that he "would like to see a million Mogadishus." Think again.More dead American troops would have been preferred to the "larger moral negative" of a victory that boosted President Bush's chances for re-election, according to the Salon big."Many antiwar commentators have argued that once the war started, even those who oppose it must now wish for the quickest, least-bloody victory followed by the maximum possible liberation of the Iraqi people," Kamiya wrote. "But there is one argument against this: What if you are convinced that an easy victory will ultimately result in a larger moral negative — four more years of Bush, for example, with attendant disastrous policies, or the betrayal of the Palestinians to eternal occupation, or more imperialist meddling in the Middle East or elsewhere?"Wishing for things to go wrong is the logical corollary of the postulate that the better things go for Bush, the worse they will go for America and the rest of the world." Thus goes the reasoning at Salon, which is moderate compared to the hateful rantings of some U.S. leftists.How ironic that the more these "liberals" reveal themselves to America, the more they boost a president they so despise.

http://www.newsmax.com/showinsidecover.shtml?a=2003/4/18/162336

It's True: 'Liberals' Wanted Saddam to Beat U.S.

I was against the war but I didn't want Hussein to defeat the U.S. Neither did the vast majority of anti-war protesters. Any American that would want this country to lose in a war with anyone, is not a true American.

This article is propaganda designed to further discredit those who were not in favor of the war. It comes from News Max which is a Right Wing Conservatist news wire so the article has no credibility. It further promotes division and dissension in this country and frankly, that is what the Right Wing Conservatists are all about. They are the ones who are un-American because they do not promote the principles of democracy in this country. I have never read anything in News Max that did not slander anyone who disagrees with their ideologies. In fact, I have seen News Max print what I knew from credible sources to be outright lies.

I found the article offensive. How dare they say that anti-war Americans wanted more of our soldiers to be killed. That is asinine and so is this entire article. If it were from a credible source it would be different. But anything in News Max is not credible and it is sheer propaganda designed to promote their Right Wing Conservatist agenda. IMHO

Love, Connie

You know....I don't know if those of us here who are anti war would be labeled "liberals" or not.........but if you are lumping us altogether, Joyce......and saying that WE WANTED SADDAM TO WIN......

....then I am rip roaring mad ...I am angry as hell!!! I am pissed off!!!

How DARE anyone tell me that I'm thinking such a ridicules thing as that?????

That's like me saying, all those who were pro this blood bath, were for it, because they took delight in seeing all the dead and maimed bodies of both soldiers and civilians alike....the more gore the better.....I mean, isn't that what war is all about????

DON'T ANYBODY EVER DARE TELL ME WHAT I'M THINKING.....EVER!

Hi Joyce

I'm at a little bit of a loss as to what to make of this story. In the first place, although the apparent subject under discussion is Salon Editor Gary Kimiya's statements, you don't quote Kimiya or provide any source ... rather you quote the ultra-conservative NewsMax.com, which quotes the Washington Times, which in turn purports to quote Kamiya ... although none of these publications provide any source for Kamiya's supposed statements: no link, no date, no article name ...

The closest thing to an attribution I could find was Greg Pierce asserting (in the Times) that these were things Kamiya "wrote last week." Great reporting.

I actually went to Salon.com itself to try to find Kamiya's purported statements, and was unable to do so. There's a very good search engine there, and I tried every possible combination of words and phrases that Kamiya was "quoted" as saying. Nothing. Sooo ...

Of course to be fair, neither Pierce nor NewsMax actually said that he wrote these things in Salon (although they certainly gave that impression). Maybe he wrote them in a letter to a friend, or on some scribbled notes to himself, or ... Who knows? Certainly not any of the folks who read the NewsMax article or the Times article that it quoted!

However, leaving aside the cardinal rule of journalism that one does NOT responsibly "quote" anyone without providing verifiable documentation for the source of the quotations, let's assume for the purpose of argument that Kamiya, the editor of a "left-leaning" journal (although I've seen some pretty strong "conservative" opinion in Salon, too), DID make these statements that are attributed to him. If so, so what? Would that establish the "truth" of your post's assertion, that "liberals" wanted Saddam to beat the U.S.? Hardly. Even according to this unverified quotation, Kamiya is cited as acknowldeging that "Many antiwar commentators have argued that once the war started, even those who oppose it must now wish for the quickest, least-bloody victory followed by the maximum possible liberation of the Iraqi people," which oddly enough is EXACTLY the sentiment expressed by the anti-war posters on THIS site!

So again, what's the point? That some people, somewhere, wished for Saddam's victory, or at least that he would give the American forces a tougher battle? Well, duhhh ... of course there were such people! And?

Unless I'm really missing something here, this argument seems to amount to the logical proposition that since someone who might be called a liberal said somewhere that a quick and easy victory might lend moral support to a war that they perceived as wrong, therefore "liberals" (which in current debates has come to mean "all those opposed to Bush's war policies") wanted Saddam to defeat the U.S.!

Not only is that a manifestly illogical conclusion, but it quite clearly doesn't apply to those of us here who've said in NO uncertain terms that we wish this war hadn't started, and we hope it doesn't lead to more wars, but since it HAS started we hope fervently for a speedy victory with minimum loss of life and a genuine restoration of freedom to the Iraqi people.

I don't mean to be unfair to you if that's NOT the point you were trying to make ... and if it isn't, please say so ... but MY impression is that this article is just another in a long line of arguments designed to "prove" that those who opposed this war are "unpatriotic" and were really rooting for Saddam.

In which case, my question to you is, why do you and others who support Bush's war doctrine put so much more of your energy into maligning and accusing those who oppose it, than into building and presenting a positive case FOR it?

As I see it, the major case that was put forward relentlessly to justify this war -- namely that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction and was therefore an imminent threat to the US, which justified our acting in self-defense -- has now been proved to be erroneous. If such weapons were there - certainly on any scale to represent a real threat - they would have been found by now. They haven't been.

(And if it does turn out that there were some small labs somewhere in the country making ricin or other chemical poisons - which might well be the case - well, it's kinda funny that a small-scale ricin production was just discovered here in the US ... by a man the authorities claim was intending to use the poison to kill his wife ... and who made the substance from items found in the local hardware store! That's no justification for making deadly poisons, but it would be a bit ridiculous to say it represents any "clear and present threat" to the greatest military force on earth, justifying immediate self-defensive attack!)

If there is a good case for this war, and the continued aggression that seems almost certain to follow it, why not focus on making that case rather than on attacking the character of those opposed to it? I don't really get it ... unless the obvious explanation is the correct one: that there's really NOT a strong case to be made for it, therefore there's more mileage to be gained by attacking the opponents.

That's how it looks to me, anyway.

Love,
Greg

IMHO I think the only reason the pro-war, pro-Bush factions spend all their energy attacking the character of the opponets is because they are so damned worried that we might be right. There is far more evidence coming out that there was no justifiable reason for this war than there is to justify it. I definity know that the freedom of the Iraqi people is just a smoke screen. We were never interested in their freedom in the past. Not in GW's dad's administration and not in Ronald Reagan or Clinton's administrations either.

They sure protected that oil didn't they?

Love, Connie

Well you guys will have to speak for yourselves, as I for one really DID want Saddam to "WIN"!!

Kidding of course, but it probably sounds as silly as the thread topic.
oy vey, Im sure Joyce got a kick out of it. Aries have a good sense of humour

Connie, yep, the oil was left alone (for now)...as Australia eyes up the agricultural role with supplying wheat, and the world starts to dump out French made wine.

....."a quart of wheat for a denarius and three quarts of barley for a denarius and do not damage the oil and the wine~Rev.6:6

....however, keep reading.

To read the story on the site, a free day pass is necessary and can be gotten by searching for the story "Liberation Day", clicking on it and then following the instructions.

Liberation Day

http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2003/04/11/liberation/index1.html

Liberation day
Even those opposed to the war should celebrate a shining moment in the history of freedom -- the fall of Saddam Hussein.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Gary Kamiya

April 11, 2003 | "Paris is shooting all her bullets in the August night." Those are the words with which Albert Camus opened "The Night of Truth," the soaring essay from the collection "Resistance, Rebellion and Death" written during those hot nights in summer 1944 when Paris was liberated. "In this vast setting of stones and waters, all around this river that has reflected so much history, ... once more justice must be bought with the blood of men. We know this fight too well, we are too involved through our flesh and our hearts to accept this dreadful condition without bitterness."
The next night, Aug. 25, the Allies entered the city. Camus wrote, "In the most beautiful and hottest of August nights, the eternal stars over Paris mingle with the tracer bullets, the smoke of fires, and the colored rockets of a mass celebration. The unparalleled night marks the end of four years of monstrous history and of unspeakable struggle in which France came to grips with her shame and her wrath."

The liberation of Paris. The fall of Mussolini, of Ceausescu, of Milosevic. The end of the Khmer Rouge, of Idi Amin. These are shining moments in the history of freedom, of mankind's long and bitter and never completely achieved struggle to resist tyranny and evil, to make a world where torture and rape and murder and war and injustice and savage lust for power and all the other ancient, all-too-familiar demons are pushed back into the darkness. No one, whether on the left or the right, can look at the faces of those who have been liberated, whether in Paris or Bucharest or Phnom Penh or in the American South in 1865, without feeling one's heart quicken: We did it, we won one.
"We" is not America, or France, or the Union Army, or Cambodia, or blacks, or whites, or Arabs or Jews: "We" is mankind. To stand in solidarity with humanity on those few occasions when it lurches forward is more than an honor, it is mandatory if you have a soul, like keeping faith with those you love.







And so, at this moment, as the Mordor shadow of Saddam Hussein, a truly evil man who, like a sociopathic murderous husband, killed everything that he could not control, lifts from the long-suffering people of Iraq, all of us, on the left and the right, Democrats and Republicans, America-lovers and America-haters, Syrians and Kuwaitis and Israelis and Palestinians, owe it to our common humanity to stop, put aside -- not forever -- our doubts and our grief and our future fears, and for one deep moment, celebrate.
Celebrate the 6-year-old boy -- he exists, there are thousands of him, he is running down a street in Karbala right now holding a candy bar -- who will not grow up in a world where his father, and his uncle, and his cousin are taken away by anonymous men one night and never come back.
Celebrate the young woman who will no longer be taken off the street by Saddam's agents to a house where she will be gang-raped, and a film of the rape used to blackmail her into becoming an informer.
Celebrate the Kurd who can return to the house his grandfather built without being killed.
Celebrate a world that no longer contains a regime willing to torture small children to force their parents to confess.
Why should we celebrate? Because what happens to those Iraqis is more important than our political beliefs. Even if -- especially if -- we opposed this war, even if we are disgusted with and deeply suspicious of the U.S. administration, we should celebrate. Their fate matters more.
It is a strange celebration, and not an easy one. It is tinged with sadness, and for some of us with bitterness. The new Iraq is coming into being because of a war solely initiated and largely fought by my country, a war fought not for liberation but for other reasons, none of them convincing or good. It killed many thousands of people, almost all of them Iraqis, most of them innocent. To destroy the tyrant, we also had to destroy much or most of his wretched, doomed army -- untold thousands of semiliterate peasants and poor young men from the cities, conscripts, decent men who might have become auto mechanics or teachers but never had a chance before they were sent out onto the killing fields outside Baghdad. We killed many, many civilians. And then there are the American and British dead, young men and women, sons and daughters, brothers and sisters who would be alive today had the United States not invaded a foreign country that posed no threat to us.
And it is a celebration haunted by fear. Fear that celebrating at all might be the sentimental diversion of a fool. Fear that the new Iraq could slip into anarchy or a new tyranny. Fear that the United States will fail to rebuild the shattered nation. Fear that even if we do everything right in the months and years ahead, we have already sown the seed of hatred from which terrorism springs. Fear that the Bush administration will not act to save the Israelis and the Palestinians from their tragic death-grip by forcing Ariel Sharon to give up the occupied territories, while ending Palestinian terrorism. Fear that Bush, emboldened by this victory, will embark upon a series of imperialist adventures, few if any of which will have the laudable collateral effects of this one, and which will bring down upon us even more of the world's hatred and contempt than it presently feels.
All of these regrets and fears are real. They are why those of us who opposed this war did so. Yet they are only part of the universe that is literally being born in front of us. And what we need to do is try to see everything. Yes, that means looking with unflinching eyes at not just the Iraqis we have freed from tyranny but those we have slaughtered. But it also means not just worrying about what could go wrong but acknowledging what has gone right.
Liberation day | 1, 2
If you have a conscience and a brain, this war is slowly but surely driving you off the deep end. In this most morally complex and ambiguous of conflicts, every judgment, attitude or emotion quickly turns into its opposite. Everything is conditional: from the beginning, long before the first bomb fell, what one should think about this war, from its concept to its reality, has been predicated not on the present, but on the future. This is a strained and frustrating and agnostic and deeply odd state of affairs. And for many of us who oppose the war, it has induced what almost might be called a kind of moral schizophrenia. Actually, not everything is ambiguous. One thing at least is clear: post-invasion Iraq is not likely to be a worse place than it was under Saddam. This is not to say it will necessarily be pretty: to take just one example, the news that two rival Shiite clerics were hacked to death on Thursday at one of Islam's holiest shrines is ominous. But short of a total collapse into ethnic cleansing and anarchy, it's hard to argue that whatever comes next will be as bad as Saddam's rule: It was simply too dreadful.
The larger question of the effect of the war on the region, America, and the world, however, is less clear-cut. And it is doubts about this question that have led many of us who oppose the war to that confused state of moral schizophrenia. I have a confession: I have at times, as the war has unfolded, secretly wished for things to go wrong. Wished for the Iraqis to be more nationalistic, to resist longer. Wished for the Arab world to rise up in rage. Wished for all the things we feared would happen. I'm not alone: A number of serious, intelligent, morally sensitive people who oppose the war have told me they have had identical feelings.

Some of this is merely the result of pettiness -- ignoble resentment, partisan hackdom, the desire to be proved right and to prove the likes of Rumsfeld wrong, irritation with the sanitizing, myth-making American media. That part of it I feel guilty about, and disavow. But some of it is something trickier: It's a kind of moral bet-hedging, based on a pessimism not easy to discount, in which one's head and one's heart are at odds. Many antiwar commentators have argued that once the war started, even those who oppose it must now wish for the quickest, least bloody victory followed by the maximum possible liberation of the Iraqi people. But there is one argument against this: What if you are convinced that an easy victory will ultimately result in a larger moral negative -- four more years of Bush, for example, with attendant disastrous policies, or the betrayal of the Palestinians to eternal occupation, or more imperialist meddling in the Middle East or elsewhere? Wishing for things to go wrong is the logical corollary of the postulate that the better things go for Bush, the worse they will go for America and the rest of the world. It is based on the belief that every apparent good will turn into its opposite. If this is true, then it would be better for bad things to happen to Bush. But who knows for sure that it is true? Perhaps pro-war leftist Christopher Hitchens was right when he spoke of the "cunning of history" -- perhaps the genius of Historical Progress chose Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz to be its unlikely instruments. Dialectical pessimism is the dirty little secret of the antiwar camp -- dirty because there is something distasteful about wishing for bad outcomes when the future on which those wishes are based is unknown. I say that knowing that I will probably find myself going around in circles on this issue again. It is possible that we who celebrate today will be forced to recant tomorrow. But that should not stop us. Nor should it be our concern. Those who opposed this war in part because they feared what it would do to the Iraqi people must now make every effort to protect and raise up those people. And to do that, they must pay attention to what is happening to them -- the good, the bad and the in-between. This is the most compelling reason to celebrate the end of Saddam. Call that celebration a leap of faith, if you will -- but you could also call it a binding contract, American to Iraqi, human heart to human heart. We smashed your country and we killed your people and we freed you from a monster: We are bound together now by blood. We owe each other, but we owe you more because we are stronger and because we came into your country. The left's role, now, must be to make sure that debt is paid. In another piece from "Resistance, Rebellion and Death," "Letters to a German Friend," Camus wrote the following dialogue. "I told you, 'I should like to be able to love my country and still love justice. I don't want any greatness for it, particularly a greatness born of blood and falsehood. I want to keep it alive by keeping justice alive.' You retorted, 'Well, you don't love your country.' ... "When I think of your words today, I feel a choking sensation. No, I didn't love my country, if pointing out what is unjust in what we love amounts to not loving, if insisting that what we love should measure up to the finest image we have of her amounts to not loving." America has embarked upon the riskiest, most dangerous gamble imaginable -- and the risks of the war are small compared to those that are just beginning. There are many reasons to believe that the men who run our country desire the "greatness born of blood and falsehood." But if we measure up to our finest image, if we steer our course away from injustice and reject imperial hubris, if we rebuild Iraq with the world's help and without favor or self-interest, there is a chance that Camus' ringing words, written as Paris was liberated, will apply not just to the City of Light, but to the cradle of civilization. " ... despite the suffering, despite the blood and wrath, despite the dead who can never be replaced, the unjust wounds, and the wild bullets, we must utter, not words of regret, but words of hope, of the dreadful hope of those isolated with their fate. "This huge Paris, all black and warm in the summer night, with a storm of bombers overhead and a storm of snipers in the streets, seems to us more brightly lighted than the city of Light the whole world used to envy us. It is bursting with all the fires of hope and suffering, it has the flame of lucid courage and all the glow, not only of liberation, but of tomorrow's liberty." Let it be so in Iraq -- and let us all work to make it so.

NewsMax just took the story off the wire that appeared in the Washington Times.

http://www.washtimes.com/national/inpolitics.htm

Hi Joyce

Thank you very much for tracking down the source of this story; something that NewsMax and The Washington Times SHOULD have done strictly as standard journalistic protocol when quoting someone. I thought it was a very interesting and thought-provoking story, well worth reading by every thoughtful person regardless of which "side" we are on regarding the war.

It's quite clear why the Washington Times and NewsMax.com didn't want their readers to see the full story: because it would have been apparent that Kamiya's story was FAR from supporting the claims made about it that liberals were "Cheering the Enemy" (Times) or that "'Liberals' Wanted Saddam to Beat U.S." (NewsMax). In fact, Kamiya's thesis for the whole article is stated VERY clearly in the title of the article itself:

Quote:

---

Liberation day
Even those opposed to the war should celebrate a shining moment in the history of freedom -- the fall of Saddam Hussein.

---

Yet NewsMax ant the Times completely ignored both the story's title and the author's clearly stated viewpoint in writing it:

Quote:

---

And so, at this moment, as the Mordor shadow of Saddam Hussein, a truly evil man who, like a sociopathic murderous husband, killed everything that he could not control, lifts from the long-suffering people of Iraq, all of us, on the left and the right, Democrats and Republicans, America-lovers and America-haters, Syrians and Kuwaitis and Israelis and Palestinians, owe it to our common humanity to stop, put aside -- not forever -- our doubts and our grief and our future fears, and for one deep moment, celebrate.

---

Why did these two conservative articles not want their readers to see the actual article that they claimed to be "reporting" on? Well it's very clear now, isn't it? Because anyone who DID read the full article, rather than just the out-of-context quotations that they pulled from the middle of it, would immediately see that characterizing it as a story about liberals "cheering for the enemy" or "wanting Saddam to beat the US" ... as these authors baldly stated in both their headlines and their analysis ... is purely and simply dishonest journalism. They didn't source the article because they didn't want to be caught in the act of deliberately misrepresenting it!

Thank you for having more integrity than that, Joyce, in tracking down and posting the actual source.

Whether you agree with Kamiya's overall position or not, it is a thoughtful and soul-searching piece in which he examines his own thoughts (and those of many other opponents of the war) in balancing our very real joy over the fall of a brutal dictator, without implying that because we are happy a dictator has fallen that we therefore support the administration's policies, or its decision to wage this war or future wars based on the "preventive war" strategy it has outlined.

It is an honest and introspective article, in which Gary Kamiya has the intellectual honesty to reveal his own internal doubts ("what if by cheering the speedy success of this war we unintentionally lend our support to the NEXT war?"), and in acknowledging them he even readily admits some part of the doubt is due to his own "pettiness -- ignoble resentment, partisan hackdom, the desire to be proved right and to prove the likes of Rumsfeld wrong, irritation with the sanitizing, myth-making American media. That part of it I feel guilty about, and disavow." But at the end of all his navel-picking self-examination about the moral ambiguities of the war, his CONCLUSION could not be more clear:

Quote:

---

It is possible that we who celebrate today will be forced to recant tomorrow. But that should not stop us. Nor should it be our concern. Those who opposed this war in part because they feared what it would do to the Iraqi people must now make every effort to protect and raise up those people. And to do that, they must pay attention to what is happening to them -- the good, the bad and the in-between. This is the most compelling reason to celebrate the end of Saddam.

---

Personally I think Kamiya should be applauded for the courage to show his own warts and doubts and ambiguities about this war and its aftermath and possible consequences, rather than reducing it to the simplistic "my side is right, your side is wrong" terms that so many on both sides do.

And I think that those who try to take advantage of that courage and honesty by lifting a few choice quotes out of context and using them to deceptively claim that Kamiya and other liberals were rooting for Saddam, should be called on exactly what they are doing: practicing dishonest and deliberately misleading journalism at its worst.

Thanks again for finding and quoting the article accurately, Joyce.

Love,
Greg

Thanks for posting the whole story, Joyce. It was a very long article but I was riveted to Kamyia's words.

While reading the article it soon became clear to me that the article in no way depicted the spin that News Max or the Washington Post put on the article. It in no way supports the title that you put on this post, Joyce. What the article did express so well was the inner struggle that I think all opponents of the war in Iraq went through. I know I did and have expressed that on these threads more than once. All of us here at CE who opposed the war expressed that the freeing of the Iraqi people and ridding the world of Hussein would be the good that came out of a war that, just as Kamyia stated in his article, clearly was for other reasons entirely. We also all stated that we were happy to see the Iraqi people freed. And, clearly, no matter what may happen next in Iraq, the people are still better off than they were under Hussein's reign.

The only thing that I was secretly hoping is that the people of America would see all sides of the issues and not set aside all that Bush's policies are doing to this country and not be blind to how much money the administration and corporate friends are making off this war, so that they would not vote for another four years of Bush.

If nothing else, finding this complete article written by Kamyia and then comparing the entirity of the article to the accusations of News Max and the Washington Post in their articles, should make us all more aware of how propaganda, on both sides of the issues, reflects the spin of certain news media and reporters. This is nothing new either. It has been going on since the beginning of time I think. Remember that game we used to play as kids where you whisper something in the ear of the person next to you and it is passed on through the group until the last person says out loud what he heard? It always turns out to be something completely different than what was originally whispered by the first person. That's the news media in a nutshell, with each different person putting their own spin on the issue. That is why it is always important to check the source and listen to all sides of the issues.

Love, Connie