“The prison in question was inspected by my team in Jan. 1998. It appeared to be a prison for children — toddlers up to pre-adolescents — whose only crime was to be the offspring of those who have spoken out politically against the regime of Saddam Hussein. It was a horrific scene. Actually I’m not going to describe what I saw there because what I saw was so horrible that it can be used by those who would want to promote war with Iraq, and right now I’m waging peace.”

That last sentence is about as depraved a sentence as I can imagine. Ritter deliberately obscured unspeakable horror in the quest for what he called “peace.” At least, I suppose, he was honest about it at the time. In the New York Times on Friday, a CNN honcho named Eason Jordan finally unburdens himself of horrors caused by Saddam that he had kept silent about until now in order to protect lives he felt responsible for. I respect his motives. But I do not respect his reluctance to report the reality of such evil.

It has been a week of some vindication for hawks, but doves are right in denying that their full arguments — about the dangers of preemptive war, fomenting terrorism, destabilizing world alliances, and so on — are thereby proven wrong. But there’s one thing we do now know: That this regime was vile beyond most words; that it was truly evil; that its victims piled up endlessly, irrationally, brutally, as far as the horizon. There is absolutely no doubt that this war therefore saved lives. Compared to the relentless slaughter of Saddam’s own people, let alone the terror they lived under, the allied campaign was a model of restraint and liberation, the most precise invasion in world history.

So deal with this: The antiwar movement wittingly and unwittingly played a central part in extending Saddam’s regime. I can see why some conservatives would be able to rationalize this. In a Kissingerian world of realpolitik, the victims of totalitarianism are not as important as Great Power politics, as good ties with Russia and France, as stabilizing regimes like those of Saudi Arabia and Syria. In a Tory world, where only national self-interest should motivate foreign intervention, abandoning children to a dungeon is of no major matter. But what of liberals? The delirium in the streets of Baghdad and Mosul and Basra is the flip side of a misery that we in the West cannot even begin to fathom. And yet millions of free men and women marched to keep it in power. Millions. Maybe you did. Even if you still believe it was wrong to wage this war, can you not see this point at least? That in the equation of reason, the lives of so many oppressed people should count for something?