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01-22-2006, 02:50 AM
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#1 (permalink)
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WAB Bartender
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Another tour-de-force from Steyn.
Read it and be amazed...
Quote:
SteynOnTheWorld
THE DEFEATICRATS
Hands up everyone who thinks Iraq’s a quagmire.
Not the Iraqi people. According to the latest polls, 70% think “life is good”, and 69% are optimistic that things will get even better in the year ahead. For purposes of comparison, they took a similar poll in Europe a while back: 29% of the French said they were optimistic about the future, and 15% of Germans.
Also from that ABC poll: 63% of Iraqis feel “very safe” in their own neighbourhoods, which is more than the residents of Clichy-sous-Bois can say.
Well, okay, those cheerful Iraqis are probably Shi’ites and Kurds and whatnot. How about the Sunnis? For a small minority group that held a disproportionate and repressive grip on power for decades, they’ve been getting a more solicitous press from western “liberals” than the white Rhodesians or South Africa’s National Party ever got.
But it turns out, after their strategically disastrous decision to stay home last January, the Sunnis are participating in Iraq’s democratic process in ever greater numbers.
Oh, okay, so the Shi’ites and Kurds and Sunni are feeling chipper, but in the broader Middle East the disastrous neocon invasion has inflamed moderate Arab opinion against America.
Well, it’s true the explosive Arab street finally exploded the other day. 200,000 Jordanians protested in Amman, waving angry banners and yelling, “Burn in hell, Rumsfeld” and “You are a coward, Bush”. Whoops, my mistake. They were yelling, “Burn in hell, Zarqawi” and “You are a coward, Zarqawi”. If you want to hear someone yelling “You are a coward, Bush”, you’ve got to go to Cindy Sheehan’s stake-out. And, in fairness to the network news divisions, it may be because so many of their camera crews have taken up permanent residence at the otherwise underpopulated Camp Cindy that they were unable to cover what was the largest demonstration against terrorism ever seen on the streets of the Middle East.
Oh, well. So the Shi’ites and Kurds and Sunni Iraqis and the Arab street’s on board, but come on, what about the insurgents? Everybody knows they’re winning.
Er, apparently they don’t. The Baathist diehard insurgents have split from the foreign al-Qa’eda insurgents. While the latter denounced the Iraqi election as “a Satanic project”, the Saddamite remnants urged Sunnis to participate and said they’d protect polling stations from attacks by the foreign terrorists in order that citizens could vote for their approved candidates (the leftover bits of Uday and Qusay, stuck on a tailor's dummy and now running on the Psychotic Dictatorship Nostalgia Party ticket). This division between the foreign nutcakes and the domestic nutcakes is the biggest strategic split over the insurgency since Joe Lieberman respectfully distanced himself from Nancy Pelosi.
On the other hand, it does belatedly prove the anti-war crowd’s long-held view that Saddam’s secular Baathists and Osama’s theocrat terrorists would never collaborate, even if it took until last month for the participants themselves to get wise to it. And, alas, unlike the Dems with Hillary, in the Sunni Triangle there’s no Sunni triangulator to craft a more nuanced position to hold both the Lieberbaathist and Pelosama wings together.
So the Shi’ites, Kurds, Sunni, the Arab street, and the Baath Party have figured Iraqi democracy’s winning. That leaves al-Qa’eda.
Not exactly. Ayman Zawahiri, the Number Two honcho in al-Qa’eda while they’re maintaining the polite fiction that bin Laden’s still functioning, recently rapped Zarqawi over the knuckles and called on him to cut out killings that “the masses do not understand or approve”. The twitchy Mr Zawahiri was presumably thinking of, for example, the assassination of the septuagenarian grand imam of Fallujah for urging Sunnis to get out and vote.
So the Shi’ites, Kurds, Sunni, the Arab street, the Baath Party and bin Laden’s deputy think the insurgency’s a bust. Hands up who thinks it’s winning.
Well, there’s Howard Dean: “The idea that we are going to win this war is an idea that unfortunately is just plain wrong.”
And look over there, it’s Jack Murtha, and he’s a veteran, and he thinks we need to scramble for the last chopper over the embassy compound right now! “There’s a civil war going,” he says. “Our troops are the targets of the civil war. They’re the only people that could have unified the various factions in Iraq. And they’re unified against us.”
By “us”, I think he means him and Zarqawi. And no, I’m not “questioning his patriotism”. I’m questioning his sanity. It was famously said that the Vietnam war was lost on television. In this instance, the Iraq war’s being lost only on television. In Iraq, it’s a tremendous victory. Indeed, it has the potential to be one of the most consequential transformative victories of the modern age, but, even if it doesn’t ever fulfill that potential, it’s still a huge success.
I’ve never been one for “winning the hearts and minds” of Iraqis. Heart-wise, an awful lot of them dislike infidels and Jews and American soldiers, and, while one may deplore that, it’s just a fact of life. But, in their minds, as those poll numbers indicate, the Iraqis are rational enough to work out where their best interest lies. And, quite reasonably, they figure it doesn’t lie with a psychotic death cult that nowadays mainly blows up Muslims on buses, in shopping markets, schools and even mosques. That’s the worst corporate diversification since Seagram’s bought Universal Pictures. And at least Seagram’s still made whiskey: Zarqawi isn’t killing a lot of infidels these days.
So Iraq’s hearts and minds are operating far more rationally than the Democrats, who these days are both heartless, in their indifference to the aspirations of ordinary Arabs, and mindless, in their calculation of their own best interests. I find Chirac-Schroder obstructionism easier to understand than the Dean-Boxer variety. For EU politicians (as those French and German poll numbers indicate), there’s not a lot of good options when half the babies in your maternity wards are Muslim. But what’s the thinking behind what the Democrats are doing?
Easy, you say, it’s naked partisan politics. To be sure, the broader culture has kind of internalized it as such, to the point where, for example, Dan Balz can publish a huge piece in The Washington Post which from its headline down – “Hillary Clinton Crafts Centrist Stance On War” – assumes that it’s perfectly natural to talk about the foreign policy and national security of one’s own country entirely in political terms. For Balz and for everyone he quotes in the piece, the point of a “policy on Iraq” is not to have a policy that impacts on Iraq in any real sense but to have a policy that advances domestic political fortunes. “Iraq” might as well be a board game you’re in the national play-offs of.
Example:
Her refusal to advocate a speedy exit from Iraq may reflect a more accurate reading of public anxiety about the choices now facing the country.
Note that Balz takes it for granted that Senator Rodham Clinton should have no principled position on Iraq, no strategic view of the Muslim world, no philosophical preference as to America’s mission abroad, no genuine concerns about security, etc. Indeed, he’s implicitly arguing that the greatest strength of Hillary as a viable Democratic presidential candidate – poor Joe Lieberman’s “joementum” won’t even place him in the Top Ten in the Iowa caucus – is that she’s the least encumbered with anything that will prevent her from agreeing with whatever the 10pm internal polling numbers are showing.
Take that headline: What would a “centrist stance” be on, say, the Second World War? Every few days, some media outlet or other runs a piece about how Bush is in a “bubble” – and no doubt he is, to one degree or another, as busy world leaders tend to be, by definition. But the American media raging that Bush is in a bubble is the equivalent of that famous British newspaper headline: “Fog In Channel. Continent Cut Off.” Whatever bubble Bush is in, it’s a vast jostling metropolis of diverse peoples stretching to the horizon compared to the shrunken little bubble the Democrats and the media inhabit, reinforcing each other’s illusions, like two madmen playing Chinese whispers. No serious person – by which I mean a fellow who’s aware there’s a real country called “Iraq” and it’s in a part of the world called “the Middle East” - could read that Balz analysis without weeping with laughter. Pseudo-policies are soberly considered as if they have any meaning in reality: Should we withdraw from Europe six months after D-Day? Or commit ourselves to a phased drawing down over three to nine months? Clearly, if we announce we’ll be leaving the Continent by October 27th, that might embolden Herr Hitler. But, if we say ten per cent of forces might remain until February 1947, that will give us a more flexible exit strategy with strong centrist appeal.
Meanwhile, back on Planet Earth, even the media are occasionally obliged to explain the disconnect between received wisdom on Iraq and the actual physical territory that goes by that name. “85 percent of people in the capital are looking to the future with great enthusiasm,” noted Der Spiegel, as impeccably anti-Bush as any publication on the planet, but nonetheless reporting the economic boom, rising incomes, etc, now enjoyed by many Iraqis. The magazine went on: “How does this happily expectant mood fit in with the bloody scenes of bombings and shootings, the reports of kidnappings, curfews and shortages?”
How indeed? Over to you, media ethics professors.
It’s not difficult: I said a year and a half ago that the way to look at Iraq is that the Sunni Triangle’s Northern Ireland, Kurdistan’s Scotland and the Shia south is England. Don’t let a pub bombing in Ballymena prevent you from investing in that privatized telecom company in London.
I’m not one of those fellows minded to defer to Jack Murtha because he was a hero in the last war. You could say the same of Marshal Petain, and Churchill never listened to him. But I carelessly assumed Murtha did, in fact, have something to say. Instead, as he told Newsweek – in one of those “Bush In The Bubble” stories – he’s piqued because the President didn’t reply to his memo, which rather than getting hoots of derision is now regarded as the greatest affront to constitutional propriety since Jim Jeffords failed to land an invite to the White House’s Vermont Teacher Of The Year reception, for which slight he flipped control of the Senate to Tom Daschle. (Remember him?) If Murtha and Newsweek weren’t trapped in their own bubble, they might understand that a “principled stand” has to be more than a guy whining that the President of the United States won’t return his calls:
The White House has made no attempt to reach out to Murtha since then. ‘None. None. Zero. Not one call,’ a baffled Murtha told Newsweek. ‘I don’t know who the hell they’re talking to. If they talked to people, they wouldn’t get these outbursts. If they’d talked to me, it wouldn’t have happened.'
I know who the hell they’re talking to: on Iraq the White House is talking to rather a lot of people. They’re called “Iraqis”. But Murtha is now the lion of the moment, Cindy Sheehan and Joseph Wilson IV merged into the Murtha of all anti-war heroes. So what if there’s no crushing of his dissent, only a sad man who was crushed by being dissed.
But let’s take it as read that I’m a neocon hack clinging to my feeble Wolfowitz-Perle script as Kurdistan secedes and Shia theocrats seize the south and Zarqawi commands overwhelming support from the Sunni people. Assume that John Kerry is right that “young American soldiers” are “going into the homes of Iraqis in the dead of night, terrorizing kids and children, you know, women” and that those rampaging Rumsfeldian torturers have brutalized so many of the Iraqi people that they’re unified against us.
Even so, even as crude political finessing, will this pitch work for the Democrats?
No.
Listen to Howard Dean and Nancy Pelosi. They didn’t become leaders because some freak accident took out the other contenders. They head the party because they speak for it. It’s one thing to be defeatist but the perverse triumphalism of Dean’s defeatism will keep his party mired in the minority through 2006 and 2008. Even if they were right, what’s the “meta-story”, as they say, of Mad How’s soundbite? We’re the party that glories in defeatism? “Vote for us. We told you Americans were losers and we’re right.” Even as shameless self-interest, the Defeaticrat position is a flop.
Unlike those depressed Continentals, Americans are not a pessimistic people, especially when they’ve got nothing to be pessimistic about. The tragedy is that, on so-called “liberal” terms, this is a war Democrats ought to be gung-ho for: More Iraqis participate in the democratic process than Americans; Afghanistan has more women in electoral politics than Canada. Meanwhile, in the most powerful nation on the planet, the two-party system is seizing up because one party’s gone nuts. From Murtha’s “We’re all doomed unless we quit by Tuesday” to John Kerry’s “I was against setting deadlines before I was for them”, the Defeaticrats simply have no serious contribution to make to the most pressing issue of the age. Shame on them, trapped in a quagmire of the mind with no exit strategy in sight.
National Review, December 31st 2005
Document copyright Steynonline.com. All rights reserved
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"The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it, and if one finds the prospect of a long war intolerable, it is natural to disbelieve in the possibility of victory."
- George Orwell
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01-22-2006, 03:38 AM
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#2 (permalink)
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Join Date: 08-03-03
Location: Montreal, Canada
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Brilliant. Most of the positive facts he presented were stuff I had read individually, but the media usually portrays them as aberrations, rather than showing them as part of the full picture. Awesome work. I used to read his articles in the National Post (until the Post was bought by new people in 2003).
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