Mark Steyn Hits The Nail On The Head
From the Jerusalem Post today, Mark Steyn imparts his own unique wit and logic against the Left that seems to think we are still in a quagmire, or that Iraq is tearing itself apart in a non-existent civil war.
Three years ago, in the weeks before the invasion of Iraq, it fell to the then prime minister of Canada to make the most witless public statement on the subject by any G7 leader.
"Your president has won," Jean Chretien told ABC News in early March 2003. So there was no need to have a big ol' war because, with 250,000 American and British troops on his borders, Saddam was "in a box." "He won," said Mr. Chretien of Bush. "He has created a situation where Saddam cannot do anything anymore. He has troops at the door and inspectors on the ground... You're winning it big."
That's easy for him to say, and committing other countries' armies to "contain" Iraq is easy for him to do. A quarter million soldiers cannot sit in the sands of Araby twiddling their thumbs indefinitely. "Containment" is not a strategy but the absence of strategy - and thug states understand it as such. In Saddam's case, he'd supposedly been "contained" since the first Gulf War in 1991, when Bush Sr. balked at finishing what he'd started. "Mr. President," Joe Biden, the Democrat Senator and beloved comic figure, condescendingly explained to Bush Jr. in 2002, "there is a reason your father stopped and did not go to Baghdad. The reason he stopped is he didn't want to be there for five years."
By my math, that means the Americans would have been out in spring of 1996. Instead, 12 years on, in the spring of 2003 the USAF and RAF were still policing the no-fly zone, ineffectually bombing Iraq every other week. And, in place of congratulations for their brilliant "containment" of Saddam, Washington was blamed for UN sanctions and systematically starving to death a million Iraqi kids - or two million, according to which "humanitarian" agency you believe. The few Iraqi moppets who weren't deceased suffered, according to the Nobel-winning playwright and thinker Harold Pinter, from missing genitals and/or rectums that leaked blood contaminated by depleted uranium from Anglo-American ordnance. Touring Iraq a few weeks after the war, I made a point of stopping in every hospital and enquiring about this pandemic of genital-less Iraqis: not a single doctor or nurse had heard about it. Whether or not BUSH LIED!! PEOPLE DIED!!!, it seems that THE ANTI-WAR CROWDS SQUEAK!!! BUT NO RECTUMS LEAK!!!!
A NEW study by the American Enterprise Institute suggests that, aside from the terrific press, continuing this policy would not have come cheap for America: if you object (as John Kerry did) to the $400-600 billion price tag since the war, another three years of "containment" would have cost around $300 billion - and with no end in sight, and the alleged death toll of Iraqi infants no doubt up around six million. It would also have cost more real lives of real Iraqis: Despite the mosque bombings, there's a net gain of more than 100,000 civilians alive today who would have been shoveled into unmarked graves had Ba'athist rule continued. Meanwhile, the dictator would have continued gaming the international system through the Oil-for-Food program, subverting Jordan, and supporting terrorism as far afield as the Philippines.
So three years on, unlike Francis Fukuyama and the other moulting hawks, my only regret is that America didn't invade earlier. Yeah yeah, you sneer, what about the only WMD? Sorry. Don't care. Never did. My argument for whacking Saddam was always that the price of leaving him unwhacked was too high. He was the preeminent symbol of the September 10th world; his continuation in office testified to America's lack of will, and was seen as such by, among others, Osama bin Laden: In Donald Rumsfeld's words, weakness is a provocation. So the immediate objective was to show neighboring thugs that the price of catching America's eye was too high. The long term strategic goal was to begin the difficult but necessary transformation of the region that the British funked when they cobbled together the modern Middle East in 1922.
THE JURY will be out on that for a decade or three yet. But in Iraq today the glass is seven-ninths full. That's to say, in 14 out of 18 provinces life is better than it's been in living memory. In December, 70% of Iraqis said that "life is good" and 69% were optimistic it would get even better in the next year. (Comparable figures in a similar poll of French and Germans: 29% and 15%.)
I see the western press has pretty much given up on calling the Ba'athist dead-enders and foreign terrorists "insurgents" presumably because they were insurging so ineffectually. So now it's a "civil war." Remember what a civil war looks like? Generally, they have certain features: large-scale population movements, mutinous units in the armed forces, rival governments springing up, rebels seizing the radio station. None of these are present in Iraq. The slavering western media keep declaring a civil war every 48 hours but those layabout Iraqis persist in not showing up for it.
True, there's a political stalemate in Baghdad at the moment, but that's not a catastrophe: if you read the very federal Iraqi constitution carefully, the ingenious thing about it is that it's not just a constitution but also a pre-nup. If the Sunni hold-outs are determined to wreck the deal, 85% of the Iraqi population will go their respective ways creating a northern Kurdistan that would be free and pro-western and a southern Shiastan that would still be the most democratic state in the Arab world. That outcome would also be in America's long-term interest.
Indeed, almost any outcome would. In 2002, Amr Moussa, Secretary-General of the Arab League, warned that a US invasion of Iraq would "threaten the whole stability of the Middle East." Of course. Otherwise, why do it?
Diplomats use "stability" as a fancy term to dignify inertia and complacency as geopolitical sophistication, but the lesson of 9/11 is that "stability" is profoundly unstable. The unreal realpolitik of the previous 40 years had given the region a stability unique in the non-democratic world, and in return they exported their toxins, both as manpower (on 9/11) and as ideology. Instability was as good a strategic objective as any. As Sam Goldwyn used to tell his screenwriters, I'm sick of the old cliches, bring me some new cliches. When the old cliches are Ba'athism, Islamism and Arafatism, the new ones can hardly be worse, and one or two of them might even buck the region's dismal history. The biggest buck for the bang was obvious: prick the Middle East bubble at its most puffed up point - Saddam's Iraq.
YES, IT'S come at a price. In the last three years, 2,316 brave Americans have given their lives in Iraq, which is as high as US fatalities in Vietnam - in one month, May 1968. And, if the survival of Saddam embodied the west's lack of will, the European-Democratic Party-media hysteria over the last three years keeps that question open. But that doesn't change the facts on the ground. Instead of relying on the usual ineffectual proxies, Bush made the most direct western intervention in the region since General Allenby took Jerusalem in the Great War. Now on to the next stage.
The point? Do not buy the media's hype. Do not believe there is a civil war erupting in Iraq, because one is not running rampant over the landscape. Indeed, al-Zarqawi's thugs tried to bring one about by going after the Al-Askari mosque; its detonation was supposed to whipped opposing factions into a frenzy. Sure, there were a few deaths from that attack, but both sides have pretty much clamed down. In addition to that Muqtada al-Sadr popped his head up and told both sides to knock it off.
Wow. Is al-Sadr on the side of a free and democratic Iraq now? Maybe. I would not hold my breath on that, but it is a distinct possibility that he has decided to let bygones be bygones are start anew. Of course, Iran would like to try that now, but they are already too far down the wrong path; the bend they went around is no longer in sight. But Iraq is moving forward, which is a surprising 180 degree turn from three years ago in comparison.
The Left wanted the war and democratization done and finished in time for the six o' clock news. War does not work that way. And estasblishing a brand new government cannot be built in a day. Even Rome was not built in a day. But I suppose the Left believes that in the 21st Century world, we can snap our fingers, and with a little magic from Pixar or Industrial Light and Magic, voila, we have a brand new Iraq. Again, is does not work that way. We were an independent nation in 1776, but we did not have our own Constitution until 1781. We are still in Germany and Japan after sixty years, from World War II up to present. Granted, we are there now at their behest, and not in occupation, but we did occupy both nations in efforts to rebuild them, and prevent them from ever being a global problem again.
It is not easy, and I wish the Left would understand this. There is no way to do this all in a year. The factions are wide and varied in Iraq, just as much as those in Afghanistan. The difference is, as Mark points out, should they not work together in Iraq, there is a provision within the Constitution allowing the Kurds and Shia to establish their own democratic provinces in Iraq; provinces that will be recognized by Iraq.
We are sorry that the media was expecting a quick resolution. Had they been in charge of the war, they would have given up the moment a soldier had broken a nail; proclaiming for all that we were in a quagmire. Pathetic. The Left would do better to sit back, shut up, and enjoy the ride. The president knows what he is doing and the same goes for his administration. They are the ones in the know, and their detractors should allow them to do the job they were elected and appointed to do.
The Bunny ;)
From the Jerusalem Post today, Mark Steyn imparts his own unique wit and logic against the Left that seems to think we are still in a quagmire, or that Iraq is tearing itself apart in a non-existent civil war.
Three years ago, in the weeks before the invasion of Iraq, it fell to the then prime minister of Canada to make the most witless public statement on the subject by any G7 leader.
"Your president has won," Jean Chretien told ABC News in early March 2003. So there was no need to have a big ol' war because, with 250,000 American and British troops on his borders, Saddam was "in a box." "He won," said Mr. Chretien of Bush. "He has created a situation where Saddam cannot do anything anymore. He has troops at the door and inspectors on the ground... You're winning it big."
That's easy for him to say, and committing other countries' armies to "contain" Iraq is easy for him to do. A quarter million soldiers cannot sit in the sands of Araby twiddling their thumbs indefinitely. "Containment" is not a strategy but the absence of strategy - and thug states understand it as such. In Saddam's case, he'd supposedly been "contained" since the first Gulf War in 1991, when Bush Sr. balked at finishing what he'd started. "Mr. President," Joe Biden, the Democrat Senator and beloved comic figure, condescendingly explained to Bush Jr. in 2002, "there is a reason your father stopped and did not go to Baghdad. The reason he stopped is he didn't want to be there for five years."
By my math, that means the Americans would have been out in spring of 1996. Instead, 12 years on, in the spring of 2003 the USAF and RAF were still policing the no-fly zone, ineffectually bombing Iraq every other week. And, in place of congratulations for their brilliant "containment" of Saddam, Washington was blamed for UN sanctions and systematically starving to death a million Iraqi kids - or two million, according to which "humanitarian" agency you believe. The few Iraqi moppets who weren't deceased suffered, according to the Nobel-winning playwright and thinker Harold Pinter, from missing genitals and/or rectums that leaked blood contaminated by depleted uranium from Anglo-American ordnance. Touring Iraq a few weeks after the war, I made a point of stopping in every hospital and enquiring about this pandemic of genital-less Iraqis: not a single doctor or nurse had heard about it. Whether or not BUSH LIED!! PEOPLE DIED!!!, it seems that THE ANTI-WAR CROWDS SQUEAK!!! BUT NO RECTUMS LEAK!!!!
A NEW study by the American Enterprise Institute suggests that, aside from the terrific press, continuing this policy would not have come cheap for America: if you object (as John Kerry did) to the $400-600 billion price tag since the war, another three years of "containment" would have cost around $300 billion - and with no end in sight, and the alleged death toll of Iraqi infants no doubt up around six million. It would also have cost more real lives of real Iraqis: Despite the mosque bombings, there's a net gain of more than 100,000 civilians alive today who would have been shoveled into unmarked graves had Ba'athist rule continued. Meanwhile, the dictator would have continued gaming the international system through the Oil-for-Food program, subverting Jordan, and supporting terrorism as far afield as the Philippines.
So three years on, unlike Francis Fukuyama and the other moulting hawks, my only regret is that America didn't invade earlier. Yeah yeah, you sneer, what about the only WMD? Sorry. Don't care. Never did. My argument for whacking Saddam was always that the price of leaving him unwhacked was too high. He was the preeminent symbol of the September 10th world; his continuation in office testified to America's lack of will, and was seen as such by, among others, Osama bin Laden: In Donald Rumsfeld's words, weakness is a provocation. So the immediate objective was to show neighboring thugs that the price of catching America's eye was too high. The long term strategic goal was to begin the difficult but necessary transformation of the region that the British funked when they cobbled together the modern Middle East in 1922.
THE JURY will be out on that for a decade or three yet. But in Iraq today the glass is seven-ninths full. That's to say, in 14 out of 18 provinces life is better than it's been in living memory. In December, 70% of Iraqis said that "life is good" and 69% were optimistic it would get even better in the next year. (Comparable figures in a similar poll of French and Germans: 29% and 15%.)
I see the western press has pretty much given up on calling the Ba'athist dead-enders and foreign terrorists "insurgents" presumably because they were insurging so ineffectually. So now it's a "civil war." Remember what a civil war looks like? Generally, they have certain features: large-scale population movements, mutinous units in the armed forces, rival governments springing up, rebels seizing the radio station. None of these are present in Iraq. The slavering western media keep declaring a civil war every 48 hours but those layabout Iraqis persist in not showing up for it.
True, there's a political stalemate in Baghdad at the moment, but that's not a catastrophe: if you read the very federal Iraqi constitution carefully, the ingenious thing about it is that it's not just a constitution but also a pre-nup. If the Sunni hold-outs are determined to wreck the deal, 85% of the Iraqi population will go their respective ways creating a northern Kurdistan that would be free and pro-western and a southern Shiastan that would still be the most democratic state in the Arab world. That outcome would also be in America's long-term interest.
Indeed, almost any outcome would. In 2002, Amr Moussa, Secretary-General of the Arab League, warned that a US invasion of Iraq would "threaten the whole stability of the Middle East." Of course. Otherwise, why do it?
Diplomats use "stability" as a fancy term to dignify inertia and complacency as geopolitical sophistication, but the lesson of 9/11 is that "stability" is profoundly unstable. The unreal realpolitik of the previous 40 years had given the region a stability unique in the non-democratic world, and in return they exported their toxins, both as manpower (on 9/11) and as ideology. Instability was as good a strategic objective as any. As Sam Goldwyn used to tell his screenwriters, I'm sick of the old cliches, bring me some new cliches. When the old cliches are Ba'athism, Islamism and Arafatism, the new ones can hardly be worse, and one or two of them might even buck the region's dismal history. The biggest buck for the bang was obvious: prick the Middle East bubble at its most puffed up point - Saddam's Iraq.
YES, IT'S come at a price. In the last three years, 2,316 brave Americans have given their lives in Iraq, which is as high as US fatalities in Vietnam - in one month, May 1968. And, if the survival of Saddam embodied the west's lack of will, the European-Democratic Party-media hysteria over the last three years keeps that question open. But that doesn't change the facts on the ground. Instead of relying on the usual ineffectual proxies, Bush made the most direct western intervention in the region since General Allenby took Jerusalem in the Great War. Now on to the next stage.
The point? Do not buy the media's hype. Do not believe there is a civil war erupting in Iraq, because one is not running rampant over the landscape. Indeed, al-Zarqawi's thugs tried to bring one about by going after the Al-Askari mosque; its detonation was supposed to whipped opposing factions into a frenzy. Sure, there were a few deaths from that attack, but both sides have pretty much clamed down. In addition to that Muqtada al-Sadr popped his head up and told both sides to knock it off.
Wow. Is al-Sadr on the side of a free and democratic Iraq now? Maybe. I would not hold my breath on that, but it is a distinct possibility that he has decided to let bygones be bygones are start anew. Of course, Iran would like to try that now, but they are already too far down the wrong path; the bend they went around is no longer in sight. But Iraq is moving forward, which is a surprising 180 degree turn from three years ago in comparison.
The Left wanted the war and democratization done and finished in time for the six o' clock news. War does not work that way. And estasblishing a brand new government cannot be built in a day. Even Rome was not built in a day. But I suppose the Left believes that in the 21st Century world, we can snap our fingers, and with a little magic from Pixar or Industrial Light and Magic, voila, we have a brand new Iraq. Again, is does not work that way. We were an independent nation in 1776, but we did not have our own Constitution until 1781. We are still in Germany and Japan after sixty years, from World War II up to present. Granted, we are there now at their behest, and not in occupation, but we did occupy both nations in efforts to rebuild them, and prevent them from ever being a global problem again.
It is not easy, and I wish the Left would understand this. There is no way to do this all in a year. The factions are wide and varied in Iraq, just as much as those in Afghanistan. The difference is, as Mark points out, should they not work together in Iraq, there is a provision within the Constitution allowing the Kurds and Shia to establish their own democratic provinces in Iraq; provinces that will be recognized by Iraq.
We are sorry that the media was expecting a quick resolution. Had they been in charge of the war, they would have given up the moment a soldier had broken a nail; proclaiming for all that we were in a quagmire. Pathetic. The Left would do better to sit back, shut up, and enjoy the ride. The president knows what he is doing and the same goes for his administration. They are the ones in the know, and their detractors should allow them to do the job they were elected and appointed to do.
The Bunny ;)
posted by Syd And Vaughn | 12:56 AM
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