http://www.suntimes.com/output/steyn/cst-edt-steyn04.html
Dems Determined To Ignore Progress In Iraq
Chicago Sun-Times
12/04/05
Mark Steyn
Sen. Joe Lieberman, Democrat of Connecticut, came out with a big
statement on Iraq last week. Did you hear about it? Probably
not. Everyone was still raving about his Democrat colleague,
Rep. Jack Murtha, whose carefully nuanced position on Iraq is:
We're all doomed unless we pull out by next Tuesday! (I quote
from memory.)
Also, the United States Army is "broken," "worn out" and "living
hand to mouth." If the reaction to Murtha's remarks by my
military readers is anything to go by, he ought to be grateful
they're still bogged down in Iraq and not in the congressional
parking lot.
It's just about acceptable in polite society to disagree with
Murtha, but only if you do it after a big 20-minute tongue bath
about what "a fine man" he is (as Rumsfeld said) or what "a good
man" he is (as Cheney called him) or what "a fine man, a good
man" he is (as Bush phrased it). Nobody says that about
Lieberman, especially on his own side. And, while the media were
eager to promote Murtha as the most incisively insightful
military expert on the planet, this guy Lieberman's evidently
some nobody no one need pay any attention to.
Here's why. His big piece on Iraq was headlined "Our Troops Must
Stay."
And who wants to hear that? Not the media and certainly not
Lieberman's colleagues in the Defeaticrat Party. It must be
awful lonely being Joe Lieberman in the Democratic Party these
days. Every time he switches on the news there's John Kerry
sonorously droning out his latest pretzel of a position: Insofar
as I understand it, he's not calling for a firm 100 percent
fixed date of withdrawal -- like, say, Feb. 4, 2 p.m.; meet at
Baghdad bus station with two pieces of carry-on. Don't worry,
it's not like flying coach on TWA, you'd be able to change the
date without paying a surcharge. But Kerry drones that we need
to "set benchmarks" for the "transfer of authority." Actually,
the administration's been doing that for two years -- setting
dates for the return of sovereignty, for electing a national
assembly, for approving a constitution, etc, and meeting all of
them. And all during those same two years Kerry and his fellow
Democrats have huffed that these dates are far too premature,
the Iraqis aren't in a position to take over, hold an election,
whatever. The Defeaticrats were against the benchmarks before
they were for them.
These sad hollow men may yet get their way -- which is to say
they may succeed in persuading the American people that a
remarkable victory in the Middle East is in fact a humiliating
defeat. It would be an incredible achievement. Peter
Worthington, the Canadian columnist and veteran of World War II
and Korea, likes to say that there's no such thing as an
unpopular won war. The Democrat-media alliance are determined to
make Iraq an exception to that rule. In a week's time, Iraqis
will participate in the most open political contest in the
history of the Middle East. They're building the freest society
in the region, and the only truly federal system. In
three-quarters of the country, life has never been better.
There's an economic boom in the Shia south and a tourist boom in
the Kurdish north, and, while the only thing going boom in the
Sunni Triangle are the suicide bombers, there were fewer of
those in November than in the previous seven months.
Meanwhile, Iraq's experiment in Arab liberty has had ripple
effects beyond its borders, pushing the Syrians most of the way
out of Lebanon, and in Syria itself significantly weakening Baby
Assad's regime. Saad Eddin Ibrahim, who's spent years as a
beleaguered democracy advocate in Egypt, told the Washington
Post's Jim Hoagland the other day that, although he'd opposed
the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq, he had to admit it had
"unfrozen the Middle East, just as Napoleon's 1798 expedition
did. Elections in Iraq force the theocrats and autocrats to put
democracy on the agenda, even if only to fight against us. Look,
neither Napoleon nor President Bush could impregnate the region
with political change. But they were able to be the midwives."
The Egyptians get it, so do the Iraqis, the Lebanese, the
Jordanians and the Syrians. The choice is never between a risky
action and the status quo -- i.e., leaving Saddam in power, U.N.
sanctions, U.S. forces sitting on his borders. The stability
fetishists in the State Department and the European Union fail
to understand that there is no status quo: things are always
moving in some direction and, if you leave a dictator and his
psychotic sons in business, and his Oil-for-Food scam up and
running, and his nuclear R&D teams in places, chances are
they're moving in his direction.
Toppling Saddam was worth doing in and of itself. Toppling
Saddam and trying to "midwife" (in Ibrahim's word) a free
society would be worth doing even if it failed. But, as it
happens, I don't believe it will fail, not just because of Bush
but because enough Iraqis -- Shia, Kurds and even significant
numbers of Sunnis -- are determined not to let it fail.
And here's where the scale of the Bush gamble becomes clear.
Islam and "the West" have a long history. And, without rehashing
the last millennium and a half, the Muslim conquest of Europe
and then the Crusades and the fall of Andalusia, if you take out
a map of the world and look at the rise of the European empires
you notice a curious thing: in conquering the world the imperial
powers for the most part simply bypassed the Islamic world. They
made Africa and South Asia and Latin America and everywhere else
seats of European power, but they left the Middle East alone.
And, even when they eventually got their hands on the region,
after the First World War, they made no serious attempt to
reform the neighborhood. We live with the consequences of that
today.
So Bush has chosen to embark on a project every other great
power of the last half-millennium has shrunk from: the
transformation of the Middle East. You can argue the merits of
that, but once it's underway it's preposterous to suggest we
need to have it all wrapped up by Jan. 24. The Defeaticrats'
loss of proportion is unworthy of a serious political party in
the world's only superpower. In next week's election, the Iraqi
people will shame them yet again.
--
Ms Liberty - United States of America
"Gun control often serves as a gateway to tyranny. Tyrants from
Hitler to Mao to Stalin have sought to disarm their own
citizens, for the simple reason that unarmed people are easier
to control. Our Founders, having just expelled the British army,
knew that the right to bear arms serves as the guardian of every
other right. This is the principle so often ignored by both
sides in the gun control debate. Only armed citizens can resist
tyrannical government." - Ron Paul
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