From the lead story in today’s Salon, which notes “even those who oppose the war should celebrate a shining moment in the history of human freedom.”
April 11, 2003 | The liberation of Paris. The fall of Mussolini, of Ceacescu, 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 Pen 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.
These paragraphs come from Salon’s executive editor, Gary Kamiya, whose newsmagazine has offered daily jeremiads against this intervention. Gary Kamiya, whose newsmagazine has doled out daily diatribes against America’s having taken the conspicuous lead in affirming what he now calls “our common humanity.”
Gary Kamiya, who concludes today’s editorial with yet more of his “doubts” and “grief” and “future fears”.
Someone please explain this self-annihilating un-logic. Am I to understand that Kamiya is pro-liberation (“liberation” is Kamiya’s word – the title of his essay, in fact) but anti-doubt, -grief, and -future fears? Is he pro-“struggle to resist tyranny and evil” but anti-shooting?
At no point has Kamiya ever offered an alternative method of “liberation” than the one he now waxes poetic in the wake of. He is one of the droves of editorialists who put great stock in “inspections” and “diplomatic pressure” and “international consensus” without ever offering anything more than vague hopes for liberation.
Now that his vague hopes are a reality, and Salon runs a lead photo of joyous Iraqis kissing the cheeks of a smiling 3rd Infantry soldier, Kamiya is in the intellectually plum position of being able to write this infuriating shit and still hang onto his cherished oppositionist cred.