Saddam Hussein as captured during a lightning raid that apparently caught him quite unawares last night. CNN has a story on it here. This is good news on many levels.  For one thing, as there is likely to be a trial for his war crimes, there will finally be more attention given to the horrors committed by this man and his regime.  Opponents to the war in Iraq have been amazingly silent on all the evidence of mass murders committed by Saddam.  The one that chilled me to the bone was a mass grave in which a little girl was found still clutching a doll -- she was buried alive.

Saddam has been defiant about this already and responded, "They were thieves." Yea, all those women and children stealing...something..."  There will be plenty of shame to go around to those journalists, protesters, and others who turned a blind eye to the horrors perpetuated by Saddam against innocents.  A blind eye so that they could focus their ire on Bush. 

No doubt the fixation on Weapons of Mass Destruction, one of many reasons given for the toppling of Saddam, will still get plenty of coverage.  But I seem to recall little outrage over Kosovo when it turned out there was zero evidence of "ethnic" cleansing. A couple of mass graves with a few hundred young men in them was about the extent of "genocide" in Kosovo.  Were there street demonstrations in Europe and the United States over bombing civilians in Serbia over this? Nope.

Which makes one wonder -- do the people who are against the war in Iraq simply blinded by their hatred of Bush or are they racist? Racist in the sense that the mass deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocents by Saddam's regime isn't that big of a deal because they're not white?  After all, most of the anti-war people also propose turning everything over to the UN. The same UN that stood by and watched hundreds of thousands of people slaughtered in Rwanda. Of course, those people weren't white. You see the pattern here? There's really only two likely scenarios: Either these people don't really think killing of non-white people is a big deal or they hate George W. Bush so much that it's clouding their rational thinking.  I tend to think it's a bit of both.

The capture of Saddam will bring to light the horrors of Saddam's Iraq. It will be incredibly difficult to sweep the atrocities under the rug (like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have done with their selective recount of war crimes). People around the world will finally have to come to grips that the United States did the right thing when it liberated Iraq from one of the most brutal monsters in history.  Certainly not the primary objective for US forces but one that cannot be denied nonetheless.