Mark Steyn does it again
With his unique flare, some humor, and a fair bit of history lesson, he makes the case for supporting Senator Joe Lieberman (or is that President Bush) on Iraq policy. You must read it. There are many juicy tidbits in it.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.
...
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.
...
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.
Go read the whole thing.
Hat Tip: Powerline, who also publishes an interesting exchange on the Lieberman article.
Coincidentally, earlier this week, reader Michael Valois asked Columbia Journalism Review editor Steve Lovelady "what he thought
about the MSM ignoring Joe Lieberman's positive report from Iraq." Valois wrote:Steve, Sen. Lieberman just returned from his FOURTH post-invasion trip to Iraq and writes in the Wall Street Journal: "I have just returned from my fourth trip to Iraq in the past 17 months and can report real progress there. More work needs to be done, of course, but the Iraqi people are in reach of a watershed transformation from the primitive, killing tyranny of Saddam to modern, self-governing, self-securing nationhood--unless the great American military that has given them and us this unexpected opportunity is prematurely withdrawn...It is a war between 27 million and 10,000; 27 million Iraqis who want to live lives of freedom, opportunity and prosperity and roughly 10,000 terrorists who are either Saddam revanchists, Iraqi Islamic extremists or al Qaeda foreign fighters who know their wretched causes will be set back if Iraq becomes free and modern."
Why can't we read about Sen. Leiberman's views in the NY Times or in the Washington Post? Why is it that President Bush and Sen. Lieberman can give facts to readers from BOTH sides of the aisle, but Mr. [Calvin] Woodward can't manage to do so in an AP wire dispatch?
Lovelady responded:You think the New York Times and Washington Post should write a story every time a neocon hawk pens an essay for the Wall Street Journal's editorial page?
Somehow, I don't see that happening...
And there, ladies and gentelemen, you have it.
Let me see if I have the scorecard correct. In the 2000 election there were 3 neocons on the two main Presidential tickets: The Republican Presidential candidate, the Republican Vice Presidential candidate and the Democratic Vice Presidential candidate. Is that why all those old people in Florida got so confused? Wow, now I understand.
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