Miracle
Iraq's Political Miracle
Voting day in Iraq is a miracle only if you don't know what it's taken, especially given the constant hail of defeatism from the partisan Left, and the sheer bad faith of professional fools like Joe Biden and Harry Reid, aided and abetted throughout by their sycophants in the media. These were shameful performances on every count, including that they occurred with US troops in the field.
Biden's Bright Idea on Iraq, you will recall, was that the country should be partitioned into three religio-ethnic states, a idea so blindingly wrong-headed and stupid that only a clown like Joe Biden could come up with it. If Joe thinks that balkanization -- creating weak mini-states that will exist in an endless condition of mutual antagonism and war, and become pawns of the powerful neighbors that surround them -- is a good idea, then he needs to read a description of the tragic history of the Balkans, and how that tragedy has repeatedly spread outward beyond the region itself. He might be interested in how WWI started, for example. Only a 25-watt intellect like Biden's could possibly imagine that creating three new Lebanons in the heart of the Mid-East would be anything but a prescription for never-ending disaster.
That Joe Biden should now be talking about success in Iraq as if he and his liberal cohorts in the Congress made anything but a negative contribution to that success makes me want to puke in his and their general direction. Ditto for those who blithely talk about Iraq as a "big mistake," a "disastrous policy," etc., as it those are self-evident truths. They aren't truths of any kind. Bush's policy of attempting to create the conditions for the fundamental reform of that society in the heart of Islam was the correct policy from the start. It was the only avenue that could promise a decent long-term future for the people of that region and an eventual demise of the culture of jihad aimed at the West. To this day, no serious alternative to that policy has ever been offered.
The US effort in religiously and ethnically riven Iraq, an ancient and distant society crippled and debased by the long rule of a monstrous dictator, and crawling with terrorist insurgents, was/is the most complex and difficult foreign project ever attempted, in history, by any nation. The democratization of Imperial Japan after WWII, which observers of every political stripe look back on with pride, was child's play compared with this.
Byron
Iraqi democracy, let us not forget, is entering only its fifth year. It is patently imperfect to Western eyes, but it is, on its own terms, a miracle. Contrast Iraq—as the peerless Fouad Ajami did Wednesday in The Wall Street Journal—with Egypt, where Hosni Mubarak has ruled undemocratically for 29 years! For all the violence in their land, Iraqis have something that Egyptians crave: the vote. It is no wonder that Mubarak pours scorn on Iraq: Had Egyptians had a free vote at any time during his heavy-handed time as pharaoh, they would have sent him packing from Cairo seated on the back of an ass.
Voting day in Iraq is a miracle only if you don't know what it's taken, especially given the constant hail of defeatism from the partisan Left, and the sheer bad faith of professional fools like Joe Biden and Harry Reid, aided and abetted throughout by their sycophants in the media. These were shameful performances on every count, including that they occurred with US troops in the field.
Biden's Bright Idea on Iraq, you will recall, was that the country should be partitioned into three religio-ethnic states, a idea so blindingly wrong-headed and stupid that only a clown like Joe Biden could come up with it. If Joe thinks that balkanization -- creating weak mini-states that will exist in an endless condition of mutual antagonism and war, and become pawns of the powerful neighbors that surround them -- is a good idea, then he needs to read a description of the tragic history of the Balkans, and how that tragedy has repeatedly spread outward beyond the region itself. He might be interested in how WWI started, for example. Only a 25-watt intellect like Biden's could possibly imagine that creating three new Lebanons in the heart of the Mid-East would be anything but a prescription for never-ending disaster.
That Joe Biden should now be talking about success in Iraq as if he and his liberal cohorts in the Congress made anything but a negative contribution to that success makes me want to puke in his and their general direction. Ditto for those who blithely talk about Iraq as a "big mistake," a "disastrous policy," etc., as it those are self-evident truths. They aren't truths of any kind. Bush's policy of attempting to create the conditions for the fundamental reform of that society in the heart of Islam was the correct policy from the start. It was the only avenue that could promise a decent long-term future for the people of that region and an eventual demise of the culture of jihad aimed at the West. To this day, no serious alternative to that policy has ever been offered.
The US effort in religiously and ethnically riven Iraq, an ancient and distant society crippled and debased by the long rule of a monstrous dictator, and crawling with terrorist insurgents, was/is the most complex and difficult foreign project ever attempted, in history, by any nation. The democratization of Imperial Japan after WWII, which observers of every political stripe look back on with pride, was child's play compared with this.
Byron
posted by Byron | Thursday, March 04, 2010
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