Sunday, March 14, 2004

One short comment on this New York Times Magazine piece by liberal Iraq-war hawk Michael Ignatieff (which is a lot less than it deserves): At one point Ignatieff says,

And when people said [of Saddam], ''He was a genocidal killer, but that was yesterday,'' I thought, Since when do crimes against humanity have a statute of limitations?

Then, a mere paragraph later, he says this:

To be sure, the Bush administration's case for war would have been more convincing if there had been any acknowledgment of previous administrations' connivance in Hussein's villainies, including Donald Rumsfeld's friendly visit to Baghdad as President Reagan's envoy in 1983, or the American failure to denounce Hussein's bloody invasion of Iran in 1980 and his gassing of the Kurds in 1988. Like Osama bin Laden, whom the United States bankrolled through the 1980's, Hussein was a monster partly of America's making.

So there should be no statute of limitations for swarthy Muslims who those who commit crimes against humanity, but it's perfectly OK to have a statute of limitations for deeply cynical American realpolitikers who aid and abet crimes against humanity?

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