I love people who can think clearly and write with a beautifully light but intellectually devastating sarcasm. Victor Davis Hanson is the world's heavyweight champion -- READ IT ALL.
For some reason Paris and Berlin -- and their American admirers -- think that the reconstruction of Iraq should be perfect in six months, despite the fact that European and U.N. efforts in the Balkans are not perfect after a near decade. Yet it is likely that Saddam Hussein -- on the lam for six months -- will be found more quickly than the odious Radovan Karadzic or Ratko Mladic who, under very suspicious circumstances, are still in hiding inside Europe five years after their hideous regimes collapsed beneath American bombs. And will the Balkans under the U.N. -- 13 years so far since hostilities commenced -- achieve stability more quickly than Iraq under American auspices? Instead, when the post-9/11 war is all over, all of the dead -- Americans, Afghans, and Iraqis -- in the first two years of fighting will prove to be a fraction of those slaughtered in the former Yugoslavia during the decade of European non-fighting. We have seen the European new world order, and its pacifist and socialist utopia leads to Sbrenica and an August of mass death in France. [Italics the author's!; Emphasis added.]
Does French euthanasia-sans-anesthetic stem from the logical culmination of ecological activist myopia, lazy poverty or both? Or was it that they thought Grandma was an expendable priority compared to marching in support of Saddam? You be the judge...
And Kosovo still hasn't had elections!
Even Amnesty International admits that Saddam murdered about 10,000 people a year -- and now the mass graves being uncovered suggest much worse -- not to mention plucking out children's eyes in front of their parents. Just assuming Amnesty's death rate alone gives us the proportionate equivalent of nearly a 911 every week being inflicted on the Iraqis by Saddam! And I have yet to see a war opponent admit this -- can you spell "intellectual bankruptcy"?
Removing dictators and implanting democracies, after all, used to be just as much a Democratic idea as was the use of force to ensure national security in a world of dangerous and criminal tyrants. But now the sorry crop of would-be presidents resembles Republican antiwar contenders circa early 1939, who would have been outraged had we agreed to join Britain in stopping a nascent Hitler in Poland and France. We can imagine that the logic of the present hysteria would have led a Howard Dean and company in the dark days of early 1943 to hold press conferences damning those who got us into North Africa or the skies over Germany ("What do all these unnecessary B-17 deaths have to do with December 7?") -- especially when we remember that the catalyst of those counter-actions, Pearl Harbor, cost us fewer lives than September 11.
For some reason or another, a series of enormously important issues -- the future of the Middle East, the credibility of the United States as both a strong and a moral power, the war against the Islamic fundamentalists, the future of the U.N. and NATO, our own politics here at home -- now hinge on America's efforts at creating a democracy out of chaos in Iraq. That is why so many politicians -- in the U.N., the EU, Germany, France, the corrupt Middle East governments, and a host of others -- are so strident in their criticism, so terrified that in a postmodern world the United States can still recognize evil, express moral outrage, and then sacrifice money and lives to eliminate something like Saddam Hussein and leave things far better after the fire and smoke clear. People, much less states, are not supposed to do that anymore in a world where good is a relative construct, force is a thing of the past, and the easy life is too precious to be even momentarily interrupted. We may expect that, a year from now, the last desperate card in the hands of the anti-Americanists will be not that Iraq is democratic, but that it is democratic solely through the agency of the United States -- a fate worse than remaining indigenously murderous and totalitarian. [Emphasis added.]
Posts
