Glenn’s already noted it, but it’s worth broadcasting this far and wide. Here’s an insider’s view of the “peace” movement and how it made itself an unwitting dupe for one of the most brutal dictators in the last few decades, all for the hatred of Amerikkka.

To be perfectly frank, we were less concerned with the suffering of the Iraqi people than we were in maintaining our moral challenge to U.S. foreign policy. We did not agitate for an end to sanctions for purely humanitarian reasons; it was more important to us to maintain our moral challenge to “violent” U.S. foreign policy, regardless of what happened in Iraq. For example, had we been truly interested in alleviating the suffering in Iraq, we might have considered pushing for an expanded Oil-for-Food program. Nothing could have interested us less. Indeed, we even regarded the paltry amounts of aid that we did bring to Iraq as a logistical hassle. When it suited us, we portrayed ourselves as a humanitarian nongovernmental organization and at other times as a political group lobbying for a policy change. In our attempt to have it both ways, we failed in both of these missions.

We were so preoccupied with our own agenda that we didn’t notice or care that the regime made use of us. When critics asked us whether the group was being exploited by the Iraqi regime, we obfuscated, and in so doing put Saddam and his minions on the same level as the U.S. government…

Tonight, I caught a portion of one of the HBO series “Band of Brothers.” It was the one in which the troops come across one of the camps (I didn’t see the whole thing, so I don’t know which it was–I think that it was Dachau).

These men (barely that–most of them were barely out of adolescence) had been through basic training, and were prepared, as well as any human can be without actually experiencing it, for the horrors of war, in which men come at other men either from afar with high-powered weaponry, or up close, with knives and bayonets, or even bare hands and fingernails, in the extreme.

But nothing in their training, even had their trainers anticipated it, could have prepared them for the horrific sights that would greet them as they liberated Germany from the madness that had overtaken that once-civilized nation for the past dozen years.

No lectures, or even films, had they existed, could have rendered them able to deal with the reality of hundreds, thousands of skeletal human beings in striped pajamas, numbers crudely tatooed on their arms to mark them and track them in the system forever–or even just for a few months–which in many cases was the same thing, walking up to them–often staggering, weak from unimaginable hunger–and hugging their deliverers, murmuring, whispering soft yet eternal words of pitiful gratitude in a language that they did not know.

No words of caution could have softened the blow to a farm kid from Iowa, who saw bodies stacked like cordwood, underfed and worked literally to death, or perforated with the few bullets that the monstrous regime had left at the end, eager to destroy as much living evidence as it could before fleeing from the liberators.

The documentary described and showed how the soldiers recruited (at gunpoint, if necessary) the local townspeople to help in cleaning up–moving and burying countless bodies, providing bread to the starving, but also keeping a close watch on them to ensure that they didn’t fatally overeat after months of deprivation.

Imagine a middle-aged matron, perhaps the Frau of the mayor, lifting the lifeless body of a nameless, despised Jew, struggling to get it into a hastily dug grave, wondering how she had fallen to such a state. Imagine her muttering, under her breath, “Wir haben es nicht gewusst.”

Perhaps they really didn’t know.

But in Iraq, they knew.

This may seem like a diversion, but bear with me.

I was brushing a fly away from the kitchen door the other day with my hand. It’s a stained, but otherwise unfinished wooden door, and as I flicked at the insect, I brushed it and caught a tiny wooden splinter under a fingernail.

I was instantly shocked at how much pain an almost-unseeable piece of cellulose could cause.

I was grilling some meat on a gas grill a couple days ago, and the meat stuck to the grill. In order to dislodge it, my hand spent a little more time above the heat than I planned, and my sensory system rapidly made me aware of that fact. This was just a momentary overheating of my fragile epidermis–what would a more extended excursion feel like? Boiling in oil, being baked alive in an oven…?

I’ve lived a very fortunate life. I’ve never known true pain. I’ve never broken a bone, or sustained any serious injury other than a sprained finger, and a deep cut on my inner thigh when I was young, which required several stitches and leaves a scar to this day. I’ve never given birth (and barring some kind of major medical advance, given my gender, never will).

My readers know that I often complain about government grown too large, but I’ve never feared a knock at the door, never worried about myself or my loved ones being taken away in the night, for no reason, to be imprisoned for years, or tortured, or murdered, or all of the above. I’ve never feared to speak my mind, and express my opinion of…anything–at least not because I thought it would result in such a knock in the night.

How then, to even begin to imagine living in a place like Saddam Hussein’s Iraq?

I think about the sudden sharp and intense pain of that miniscule splinter, and then read about a prison in which all of the fingernails are brutally torn out, along with the toenails, with nothing resembling anaesthesia other than pure terror and shock, and I simply cannot get my mind around the concept of how much suffering and unending agony that would cause. And I’m grateful for that.

I relive that momentary increase in heat on my palm and then try unsuccessfully (which is probably a blessed thing) to envision it continued, not just on my palm, but on my arm, and other arm, and legs, and torso, and head, until the flesh is searing off them, until I am finally, mercifully graced with unconsciousness from the sheer physical insult to my body, but probably not soon enough.

I suspect that the “peace” activists are as unfamiliar with the potential consequences of the depths of human depravity as I, but it seems not to slow them down at all.

I’ve often been criticized for my satirical comparisons of reportage about WW II and the present war, by those who say Hitler was so much worse–how can I equate him to Saddam? But in what way was he worse?

Hitler never used chemical weapons on his enemies in the field (ignoring the chambers of course, for those Jews, and gypsies and Catholics and faggots, who in his mind deserved it). Yes, yes, he believed that we would retaliate in kind, but there was something more there. He was gassed in the trenches of the Great War–he knew what it was like. Even he, unthinkable though it may be, had his limits. There was an element of humanity there.

There are goals, and there are capabilities. Hitler’s goals were odious, as were Saddam’s. Hitler’s capabilities, relative to the rest of the world in his time, were, given his goals, frightening. But Saddam’s goals were no less–he was constrained only by the fact that he ruled a failed Arab state, rather than a vital European one, and that was a flaw that could, and would, have been eventually rectified by purchasing what he needed, given the advancing state of technology and his ability to get around the sanctions, allowing him to use oil money to buy the most destructive weapon that the current world had to offer.

Is this an apology for Hitler? Of course not, and anyone who would interpret my words in that way is of such a low intelligence level as to be not worthy of response. My only point is that it’s possible, as bad as he was, to be worse than a Hitler. Hitler believed in something, however monstrous that something was, but Saddam believes (and as I write these words, I hope that the tense of that verb will change soon) in nothing, except raw power, and nihilism.

Yet in their hatred for America, and freedom, there continue to remain those who would embrace him and protect him, even now, after the children’s prisons have been opened, after the mass graves have been found, after the endless stories of torture and rape and slaughter start to spill from the lips of those who have been silenced by the unremittant terror for decades. And their crime is even greater than that of those who appeased and supported the ideals of the Nazis, vast though that was.

Because unlike the Germans, the Iraqi people knew. They couldn’t avoid knowing. Few of them, even the Ba’athist loyalists, were untouched by the mindless brutality of the regime. Almost everyone had either lost a family member or friend, or seen them savaged beyond the imagining of anyone in a civilized country, or had such an experience themselves. They knew, and even before the liberation, it was possible to learn it from them, albeit at great peril to both those learning and those teaching.

But when one has a juvenile, anti-capitalist, transnational progressive agenda, it’s easier to say “wenn ich es nur gewusst h