REMAKING THE MIDDLE EAST
Por su interés y relevancia, he seleccionado el artículo que sigue para incluirlo en este sitio web. (L. B.-B.)
The
other day in the Guardian, house journal of the British left, Martin Kettle
wrote:
"The war was a reckless, provocative, dangerous, lawless piece of unilateral
arrogance. But it has nevertheless brought forth a desirable outcome which would
not have been achieved at all, or so quickly, by the means that the critics
advocated, right though they were in most respects."
Very big of you, pal. And I guess that's as near a mea culpa as we'll get:
Even though George W. Bush got everything wrong, it turned out right. Funny how
that happens, isn't it?
In a few
years' time, they'll have it down pat -- just as they have with Eastern Europe.
Oh, the Soviet bloc [the Middle East thugocracies] was bound to collapse anyway.
Nothing to do with that simpleton Ronnie Raygun [Chimpy Bushitler]. In fact, all
Raygun [Chimpy] did was delay the inevitable with his ridiculous arms build-up
[illegal unprovoked Halliburton oil-grab], as many of us argued at the time: See
my 1984 column "Yuri Andropov, the young, smart, sexy new face of Soviet
communism" [see the April 2004 column: "Things were better under Saddam: The
coalition has destroyed Ba'athism, says Rod Liddle, and with it all hopes of the
emergence of secular democracy" -- published, really, in the London Spectator.]
By the way, when's the next Not In Our Name rally? How about this Saturday?
Millions of NIONists can flood into the centers of San Francisco, New York,
Brussels, Paris and proclaim to folks in Iraq and Lebanon and Egypt and Syria
and Jordan and Saudi Arabia and the Palestinian Authority that all the changes
under way in the region are most certainly Not In Their Name.
Well, I'm glad they're in mine. I got a lot of things wrong these last three
years, but, looking at events last week, I'm glad that, unlike the Nionist
Entity, I got the big stuff right. On May 8, 2003, a couple of weeks after the
fall of Saddam, I wrote:
"You don't invade Iraq in order to invade everywhere else. You invade Iraq
so you don't have to invade everywhere else." And so it's turned out.
Some of the reasons for starting to remake the Middle East in Iraq were
obvious within a day or two of September 11, 2001: By his sheer survival, Saddam
had become a symbol of America's lack of will -- of the world of Sept. 10, 2001.
But the other reasons weren't all so clear. After the liberation, the
doom-mongers dusted down the old Bumper Boys' Book of the British Empire and
rattled off a zillion pseudo-authoritative backgrounders about how Iraq was such
an artificially cobbled together phony state, the slapdash creation of the
Colonial Office in London, you can never make it work.
In fact, the artificially cobbled together country is one reason it has
worked so well. The Shi'ites are the biggest group, but, even if they were
utterly homogeneous, which they're not, they're not so large they can impose
their will easily on the Kurds and Sunnis. When the West's headless chickens
were running around squawking there were more than 100 parties on the ballot, it
was all going to be one almighty mess, they failed to understand that the design
flaw of Iraq is paradoxically its greatest strength: the traditional Arab
solution -- the local strongman -- was unavailable.
Instead, in the run-up to the election and in the month since, we have seen
various groupings form, hammer out areas of agreement, reach out to other
coalitions, identify compromise positions, etc: in a word, politics.
The sight of 8 million Iraqis going to the polls was profoundly moving to
their neighbors in Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, etc. But it was all the pluralist
multiparty smoke-filled room stuff that caught the fancy of the frustrated
political class in those other countries. It would have been possible to find a
friendly authoritarian Pervez Musharraf type and install him on one of Saddam's
solid gold toilets, but it would have been utterly uninspiring to the world
beyond Iraq's borders. It would have missed the point of the exercise.
A couple of years back, I went to hear Paul Wolfowitz. I knew him only by
reputation -- the most sinister of all the neocons, the big bad Wolfowitz, the
man whose name started with a scary animal and ended Jewishly.
In fact, he was a very soft-spoken chap, who compared the challenges of the
Middle East with America's experiments in spreading democracy after World War
II. He said he thought it would take less time than Japan, and maybe something
closer to the 1989 revolutions in Eastern Europe. I would have scoffed, but he
knew so many Iraqis by name -- not just Ahmed Chalabi but a ton of others.
Around the same time, I bumped into Dominique de Villepin, the French
foreign minister and man of letters. He was just back from Egypt, where he had
been profoundly moved when asked to convey the gratitude of the Arab people to
President Chirac for working so tirelessly to prevent a tragic war between
Christianity and Islam. You don't say, I said. And, just as a matter of
interest, who asked you to convey that?
He hemmed and hawed and eventually said it was President Hosni Mubarak.
Being polite, I rolled my eyes only metaphorically, but decided as a long-term
proposition I would bet Mr. Wolfowitz's address book of real people against Mr.
Villepin's hotline to over-the-hill dictators. The lesson of these last weeks is
that Washington's Zionists know the Arab people a lot better than Europe's
Arabists.
Islamism, with its plans to destroy America, take back Europe, colonize
Australia and set you up with 72 virgins, may be bonkers but it's a big idea.
And you can't beat it with a small, shriveled idea like another decade or three
of Hosni Mubarak or Bashar Assad or some such.
The Bush administration decided the only big idea they had to sell was
liberty. On Jan. 30, Bush's big idea squared off against the head-hackers' big
idea -- you vote, you die -- and we know which the Iraqi people chose and which
the rest of the region, to one degree or another, is following.
With hindsight, the fellow travelers were let off far too easily when the
Iron Curtain fell like a discarded burqa. Little more than a decade later, they
barely hesitated a moment before jumping in on the wrong side of history yet
again.
Not in your name? Don't worry, it's not.
Mark Steyn is the senior contributing editor for Hollinger Inc.
Publications, senior North American columnist for Britain's Telegraph Group,
North American editor for the Spectator, and a nationally syndicated columnist.