Ludicrous double standard further proof of United Nations' anti-U.S. bias

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http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/n...al/5509026.htm

Ludicrous double standard further proof of United Nations' anti-U.S. bias

'I must say," declared U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan on Wednesday, "I'm getting increasingly concerned by humanitarian casualties in this conflict. We just had the report that a missile struck a market in Baghdad, and I would want to remind all belligerents that they should respect international humanitarian law and take all necessary steps to protect civilians. Besides, they are responsible for the welfare of the civilian population in the area."

Let's back up for a moment.

According to captured Iraqi soldiers, the Saddam Fedayeen - Saddam's version of Hitlerite brown shirts - have been going door to door in parts of Southern Iraq abducting wives and children and telling husbands and fathers that if they don't fight their families will be executed or tortured or both. The untrained and poorly equipped men are forced into militarily ineffective "wave attacks" against American Bradley fighting vehicles and tanks. They get mowed down.

Dexter Filkins, a New York Times reporter traveling with U.S. forces, writes, "The Iraqi private with a bullet wound in the back of his head suggested something unusually grim. Up and down the 200-mile stretch of desert where the American and British forces have advanced, one Iraqi prisoner after another has told captors a similar tale: that many Iraqi soldiers were fighting at gunpoint, threatened with death by tough loyalists of President Saddam Hussein."

There are persistent reports that Saddam's henchmen are donning British and American uniforms in order to coax disloyal troops into surrendering to what they believe are coalition forces. They are then executed.

When they're not in coalition uniforms, Saddam loyalists are forcing actual civilians to march in front of them because they know American and British forces will go the extra mile to avoid shooting non-combatants.

Iraq's dying Baathist regime has also stationed everything from guns to tanks in, below or beside schools, hospitals, markets and mosques. They conceal weaponry behind cultural treasures, like the ancient ruins of Ctesiphon, and in graveyards hoping that an errant U.S. bomb can be spun into an American "war on Islam" or on Arabs.

In short, they defy every rule of war designed to protect the lives of innocents because they know the only thing that can slow the progress to victory are our own high standards and our collective conscience.

This shouldn't surprise anyone, because Saddam wages war exactly as he waged "peace." In defiance of international law and human decency, Saddam built palaces and bought weapons with money from the United Nations oil-for-food program while his people starved. Why shouldn't he use them as cannon fodder now?

And I bring this up to highlight the astounding chutzpah of Kofi Annan and the rest of the Al-Jazeera-watching world. Annan's comments were intended - and received - as a rebuke of the United States. After all, Annan had said exactly zero when the Iraqis used human shields in Nasiriya or when hard evidence emerged of Saddam using a hospital as a military base.

Annan has given no encouragement of any kind as the United States has risked American lives in order to spare Iraqi civilians. He's offered no acknowledgement that our precision bombs cost Americans billions of dollars in order to save thousands of non-American lives. He's only exhorted that "both sides" (wink, wink) follow "international law" after one mistake that killed slightly more than a dozen Iraqi civilians at an open air market in Baghdad.

What we are witnessing now is barely even a double standard since it's not clear Saddam is being held to any standard at all, while America's armed forces are being held to a higher standard than any - any - in human memory.

Fortunately for the Iraqis, we don't need the United Nations to serve as our conscience. And if the finger-wagging continues, we may decide we don't need the United Nations for anything at all.


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E-mail columnist Jonah Goldberg at JonahsColumn@aol.com.