There are three lessons that the world has hopefully learned from the Iraq war. The first became evident during the initial days when the Warriors of Islam proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that they have total disregard for all human life, no matter what race or religion, or whose side a person is on.
I understand the old saying “All’s fair in love and war,” but that adage implies a sense of honor, since any given protagonist would presumably be conducting himself to the benefit of someone else, such as the object of his affection.
To the contrary, the acts perpetrated by Saddam Hussein and his goons were selfish, cowardly, and lacking any connection to a notion of honor. Everything they did — machine-gunning their own people as they tried to flee battle zones, using ambulances to conceal the movement of hostile soldiers, hiding behind human shields (especially children and pregnant women), placing military command posts in hospitals and mosques and schools — was morally repugnant and without any redeeming quality.
However, the instructional message was not how treacherous the Iraqis can be; the lesson was that these are the same perfidious techniques used by the Palestinian Arabs. Watching American soldiers being lured to their deaths as they tried to render assistance to seemingly innocent civilians may not be surprising to those living in Israel who have had to confront these tactics on a daily basis, but it should have provided a wake-up call to the global audience as to what Israelis have had to endure in order to defend themselves and build a homeland.
The second lesson that should be learned from the war is the extent to which lies have been told to protect Arab governments and regimes. Over the years the world has heard from an incredible coterie of fraudulent Arab leaders and spokespersons who grossly distort nearly every fact and event related to the history of their people — not in defense of themselves and their homelands against an aggressor that doesn’t exist, but in defense of their unjustified aggression against the Jewish state, as well as the atrocities that they commit each and every day against their own Muslim brothers and sisters.
On the leader side of the liar-ledger there was Haj Amin al-Husseini, Gamel Abdel Nasser, Hafez al-Assad, and there still is Yasir Arafat and Saddam Hussein (although whether Hussein is an ‘is’ or a ‘was’ is still in question). Al-Husseini, by the way, was the notorious Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and a disciple of Josef Goebbels.
For charlatan spokespersons, we’ve had to endure Saeb Erakat, Hasan Abded Rahman, Hanan Ashwari, and Diana Buttu (all representing the Palestinian Arab position). Twelve years ago, on behalf of the preposterous Iraqi position that took us into the Gulf War, the free world came to know and loathe Tariq Aziz, formerly the deputy prime minister of Iraq and currently a guest of the U.S. military.
In the past these people were able to hide behind the cloak of time and distance in order to make their distortions sound plausible. Communications technology was such that no immediate comparison between live reality and political commentary could be made. In many instances, days and weeks would go by before news of an event was reported to the public. And those reports would often be subject to the time and space limitations of the particular medium that was disseminating the information.
Arab propagandists relied upon abridged and time-dulled testimony, or information stemming from subsequent unrelated events, to color, diffuse, and obfuscate the facts and truth. When confronted with substantive contrary evidence, the propagandists often excused their prevarications from criticism by arguing that there are no objective facts, only subjective points of view.
