Supposed leftist Mark Grueter has an interesting essay on the “self-righteous dupes” who would keep Saddam in power.

Most of the same people that oppose a war against Saddam opposed the war in Afghanistan, as well as the war on terrorism in general. And they are making very similar arguments in all cases, which, when simplified amount to something like, ?a war will do much more harm than any good.? However, their dire predictions about Afghanistan were shown to be false. The campaign did not create a humanitarian catastrophe, scores of people did not starve to death (6 million was the estimate); millions of refugees did not pour over the border; it did not become a ?quagmire.? (Refer to any of the literature coming out of the Left, in September and October 2001 especially, for examples of these claims). Civilian casualties were avoided whenever possible, in part because of the precision technology mastered over years of massive military budgets. Noam Chomsky and his co-thinkers like to cite a former professor of mine, Marc Herold, who calculated that US bombings have killed 3,000 Afghani civilians (?at least?) and counting. Herold derived this figure from a collection of European and Arab newspaper reports. The presumed and often stated objective of this tally is to demonstrate moral equivalence between the 9/11 incident and US retaliation.

All other non-Pentagon, usually left-leaning efforts to add up the numbers have yielded much lower results (approximately 1,000 was the highest). And there is an important moral and intellectual distinction between premeditated killing, which is murder, and unintentional killing or killing in self-defense, which is not. The long-term effect of the raid will almost certainly end up saving many more lives (and provide improved lives for millions more) in the long run than those that were taken away. This is grim business for sure, but as long as the ?principled? Left refuses to engage in this complex, necessary debate it cannot have an impact on actual policy. In this sense Hitchens is correct – the Left is ?irrelevant.?

He once again exposes the current left as not so much for anything, as against Amerikkka.