For having stanched
the flow of innocent blood in Iraq—with a
reduced number of casualties in both sides, and with the least
civil casualties of any war of the XX century—the American
president, whatever mistakes he may have made, deserves
the gratitude and respect of all conscious humankind.
by: Olavo
de Carvalho
When I learned that George W. Bush had decided to invade Iraq, I asked myself:
Why Iraq? Why not Pakistan, that has the atomic bomb and distributes nuclear
technology in the international terrorism market? Why not Iran? Why not Saudi
Arabia, from where money gushes into Al-Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah, etc.?
Several readers, via e-mail,
demanded that I "take a stance" on the war, but I had none. I don’t
usually have opinions on issues in which I cannot interfere. And contrary
to virtually all newspaper columnists in Brazil, I do not expect that what
I write will insufflate panic in the White House, make the Pope loose his
sleep, or raise Vladimir Putin’s blood pressure.
All I hope for is to be
able to speak to some readers in this obscure corner of the universe, helping
them, as my resources allow, to orientate themselves a little in the confusion
of the world. For this reason, I gave no opinion on the war, but I warned
my readers against the farce of those who, like the Brazilian presidential
guru Frei Betto, already accused the American president of the imminent death
of "millions of Iraqi children" (sic) and I denounced the stupidity
of countless "experts" who foretold the destruction of the American
troops by the all-powerful Republican Guard of Saddam Hussein.
In the last days of the
war, though, when the clandestine cemeteries in Iraqi prisons were opened
and the corpses started to be counted, I could not avoid noticing—and
writing—that the decision taken by George W. Bush had been morally correct
and even obligatory: any country that kills 300 thousand political prisoners
must be invaded and immediately subdued, even if it does not constitute any
danger to neighboring nations or to the supposed "international order".
National sovereignties
must be respected, but not beyond the point where they arrogate to themselves
the right to genocide. I wrote it back then and I repeat it: each procrastination
by the UN cost, in average, the death of 30 Iraqis a day, more than 20 thousand
during the two years of pacifistic babble.
Considering that period
alone, the number of those killed amounts to five times more than the total
victims of the war. For having stanched this flow of innocent blood—with
a reduced number of casualties in both sides, and with the least civil casualties
of any war of the XX century—the American president, whatever mistakes
he may have made, deserves the gratitude and respect of all conscious humankind.
The intrinsic moral correction
of the American action is so evident and undeniable that every discussion
that followed, in the international and Brazilian media, had to systematically
eschew this aspect of the question, so that public attention could be focused
at the problem of knowing whether Saddam Hussein did or did not have weapons
of mass destruction, and therefore whether George W. Bush was right or not
by invoking that reason in particular, among many others.
Now, a government that
kills 300 thousand of its subjects does not need to have high-tech means of
mass destruction, because with rudimentary means it has already started the
mass destruction in its own territory, and it must be stopped at once by whoever
has the means of doing so. The US had the means and did the right thing. The
UN had the means and didn’t do anything. Between the two, who is the criminal?
It is not by chance that
those who tried to deter American action (and take revenge against it once
it was victorious) are those very same "pacifists" of the sixties.
By pressing the American troops to leave the Vietnamese territory they delivered
South Vietnam and Cambodia into the hands of the communists, who rapidly made
3 million victims—three times more than the total death toll of decades
of war.
Not a single literate
American ignored what the result of the anti-American campaign would be, that
peace would be more murderous than war. But that was precisely what the Jane
Fondas and the Kerrys wanted. Four decades later, only a few of those "peace
lovers" have become conscious of the heinous crime to which they were
accomplices.
For having confessed their
sin, today they are the target of hate and defamation campaigns. The others
not only swept their old crime away, under the carpet of History, but slightly
varying their pretexts they rush to relapse back into it, with ferocious joy,
pretending that 300 thousand dead are nothing, that stopping by force the
Iraqi genocide was "an atrocity", as said the ridiculous and perverse
Nobel laureate José Saramago.
That this sort of argument
can only prevail through a total falsification of the news is something that
doesn’t shock. The Brazilian media spread all over the place, for example,
the confession of inspector David Kay that he did not find weapons of mass
destruction in Iraq—because these words created the bad impression that
George W. Bush had attacked an innocent country—while at the same time
hiding from the public how the sentence continued: "What we learned during
the inspection made Iraq a more dangerous place, potentially, than, in fact,
we thought it was even before the war."
Brazilian writer and philosopher, b. 1947, Olavo de Carvalho is the autor
of, among others, Os Gêneros Literários: Seus Fundamentos
Metafísicos (Literary Genres and Their Metaphysical Foundations,
1996), Aristóteles em Nova Perspectiva (Aristotle in a New
Perspective, 1997), O Jardim das Aflições: Ensaio sobre
o Materialismo e a Religião Civil (The Garden of Afflictions:
An Essay on Materialism and Civil Religion, 1998), O Futuro do Pensamento
Brasileiro (The Future of Brazilian Thought, 1998), O Imbecil Coletivo,
I e II (The Collective Imbecile, I and II). Presently in charge of the
Philosophical Seminar at the Centro Universitário da Cidade (City
University Center) of Rio de Janeiro. Columnist of the newspapers O Globo
(Rio de Janeiro), Jornal da Tarde (São Paulo), Folha
de São Paulo (São Paulo) and Zero Hora (Porto Alegre).
Website: http://www.olavodecarvalho.org.
He can reached at olavo@olavodecarvalho.org
