Stardate 20040407.2256

(On Screen): Terry Eastland writes about mass graves in Iraq, about Iraqi eyewitnesses to mass executions, and about the atrocities committed by Saddam's regime. A report has been released about that, and it's online now.

Eastland contends that those revelations will end the discussion of whether the US was right to invade and remove Saddam, making clear that questions of WMDs and whether Bush lied are moot. I'm afraid Eastland is hopelessly naive. I once thought that myself.

Before the war, a reader wrote to ask me whether it would be politically damaging if it turned out there were no substantial stockpiles of WMDs. I responded that I thought it was virtually certain Saddam had WMDs, but even if he didn't, no one would care any longer after the invasion because revelations about Saddam's atrocities would make clear that the invasion was right.

I was naive, too. The last 12 months of political rhetoric has long since opened my eyes: "compassionate" leftists don't in the slightest care about people in the world who are tortured and maimed by their own governments. They only care about whether anyone is injured or killed by American military action. Far better that thousands of Iraqis die at the hands of Saddam's torturers than that a few hundred die because of an Anglo-American invasion to take Saddam out.

Ask them about people tortured by their own governments and leftists will condemn it. But it's an abstract evil, a nebulous thing hanging outside of the range of perception. Watch what they do rather than listen to what they say and it becomes clear that they don't really care about it.

Leftists pride themselves on their compassion, and criticize "conservatives" for being heartless and brutal. Yet leftist compassion seems extremely selective. Not all pain and death is the same; it seems that what matters most is who causes that pain and death and what their motives were.

It may well be that the report Eastland talks about documents Saddam's atrocities in greater detail than before, but we've had undeniable evidence of such things since the first few weeks after the invasion. Those atrocities have long since been discounted in the rhetoric of those who opposed and still oppose the war.

What's discovered in the mass graves also will bear--certainly it should bear--on any assessment of President Bush's decision to invade Iraq. That decision was based in large part on Saddam Hussein's pursuit of weapons of mass destruction, and much of the criticism of Bush's decision stems from the fact that none has been found so far.

But Bush also made a moral case for war. And that case emphasized the large-scale atrocities Saddam Hussein committed against his own people and surely would have continued to commit if we had decided not to invade Iraq. The moral case now stands to be vindicated--mass grave by mass grave.

Unquestionably it should bear on such an assessment, but it won't.

Update 20040408: Mollbot comments.