Charles Krauthammer detects a double standard:
After all, going back at least to the Spanish Civil War, the left has always prided itself on being the great international champion of freedom and human rights. And yet, when America proposed to remove the man responsible for torturing, gassing and killing tens of thousands of Iraqis, the left suddenly turned into a champion of Westphalian sovereign inviolability.
A leftist judge in Spain orders the arrest of a pathetic, near-senile Gen. Augusto Pinochet eight years after he’s left office, and becomes a human rights hero — a classic example of the left morally grandstanding in the name of victims of dictatorships long gone. Yet for the victims of contemporary monsters still actively killing and oppressing — Khomeini and his successors, the Assads of Syria and, until yesterday, Hussein and his sons — nothing. No sympathy. No action. Indeed, virulent hostility to America’s courageous and dangerous attempt at rescue.
Now, I can’t speak for what “the left” thinks about anything, but I opposed the Iraq war not because I opposed bringing Saddam to justice, but because the way in which it was proposed to do it has resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of people. But Krauthammer makes it sound as though “removing” Saddam was basically the same as arresting Pinochet.
Suppose the police are pursuing a dangerous criminal and he runs into an apartment building full of people. Would we praise the police for heroism if, to get the criminal, they dropped a bomb on the apartment building, killing all the inhabitants inside?
A Thinking Reed 
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