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[Enforcer Talen]

March 23, 2003

Reforming Iraq a gamble . . . but it's got to start somewhere
Mark Steyn

>It's not really a ''war'' - not as the term is generally understood. There
is no possibility of a U.S. defeat. Saddam Hussein's thinking (such as it
is) can be gleaned from his recent decision to order up replicas of
British and American uniforms so that his gangsters can dress up as the
infidel and inflict atrocities on Iraqi civilians. Insofar as he has a war
aim, that's it: If you can't delay the Great Satan's victory, you can at
least taint it, by ensuring that as many as possible of your subjects die
t the hands of the Brits and Yanks or reasonable facsimiles thereof. This
is the man that Jacques Chirac assures us ''loves his people.''
>
Jacques' old buddy has now taken Iraqi military operations out of the
hands of the generals and placed them under the control of four psychotic
Saddamite family loyalists. They've had some terrific ideas: Close the
border with Iran, so the great tide of civilian refugees will be forced to
head for Kuwait and, with any luck, will get mowed down by the advancing
Americans. Saddam was greatly heartened by the big round-the-world emos
by the NION narcissists (Not In Our Name), and he evidently feels that if
he throws enough of the Iraqi citizenry into the path of Anglo-American
tanks the NIONist Entity will take to the streets of San Francisco,
Glasgow and Sydney and force President Bush to give up. You can't blame
him for thinking that way: As he sees it, Western wimpiness in 1991 gave
>him another 12 years.

Give Saddam credit. With the simple act of getting Iraqi seamstresses to
run up the Royal Marine look for Baghdad's pret-a-porter spring
collections, he's shown a shrewd understanding of the West's weak spot:
the susceptibility of its peoples to believe the worst of their own side.
We in turn should return the courtesy and see his elaborate ''plan'' for
what it is: the heart of the problem.
>
It is Saddam's intention to compensate for American squeamishness about
civilian casualties by ramping up the numbers himself. You couldn't have a
more exquisite manifestation of an all but inviolable rule: For all their
bluster about killing Jews and infidels, Arab leaders' first and last
>victims are always Arabs. This has been true ever since the Grand Mufti of
Jerusalem, the first Arab nationalist colossus of the modern era, launched
his revolt against the British in 1936. By the time the dust settled,
there were hundreds of dead British, hundreds of dead Jews, and housands
>of dead Arabs, the vast majority of that last group murdered by he
>Mufti's men as part of intra-Arab score-settling. ''Kill the Jews wherever
you find them,'' the Mufti liked to say, but, for all the stirring
rhetoric, he found it a lot easier to kill his fellow Arabs - a tradition
that his successors from Assad to Arafat have been happy to maintain.
>Saddam, like the Mufti, will depart the scene leaving behind a mound of
mostly Muslim corpses.

Fortunately for the Saddamites, there are plenty more where they came
from. On Thursday in Gaza they were jumping up and down in the street.
''Death to America!'' they chanted. ''We will give our souls and blood for
you, Saddam!'' Good. 'Cause that's pretty much all he needs from you. On
the other hand, if I were the Butcher of Baghdad, I'd be little
disappointed by the turnout: The Great Satan launches his unprovoked war
on Iraq, and only 700 Palestinians bother to protest? He needs more blood
than that, fellers.

>Cynics like Chirac are relaxed about this. Arabs have never known
democracy, so who cares? That was a more or less viable position when the
Turks, French and British were running the place. But traditional Arab
fatalism and self-victimization have mutated under various psychotic
post-colonial regimes into something far more toxic. What's wrong with the
region is not simply a purely local problem. That's the lesson of Sept. 11
- that the Arab world can no longer be entrusted to the present Arab
leadership.

Political realities require that we don't express it quite like that. As
Tony Blair told the House of Commons, ''Sept. 11 changed the psychology of
America. It should have changed the psychology of the world. Of course,
Iraq is not the only part of this threat. But it is the test of whether we
treat the threat seriously.''

So America, in returning to Iraq 12 years on, is embarking on its boldest
gamble in decades - a new Middle Eastern domino theory that says the
liberation of Iraq is the best way to reform Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia and
beyond. Yes, it's a long shot, but in this discussion it's the fellows who
>insist you can never implant Western concepts like the rule of law and
economic activity who are being the simpletons. The modern ''Middle East''
is an Anglo-French invention that they never had time to complete: They're
like Baron von Frankenstein interrupted in his lab while he's still
fine-tuning the formula and chased off by the excitable burghers, leaving
>the monster to break free of his shackles and stagger off down the hill to
>terrorize the village. But, even as a failed and prematurely abandoned
experiment, certain distinctions can be observed: A rough rule of thumb is
that the least worst countries in the region are those which were most
Britannicized. The continuing ''moderation'' (comparatively) of Jordan and
the Gulf emirates is essentially the enduring legacy of the Colonial
Office. Were Iraq to be restored to its 1950s condition as a ramshackle
Hashemite backwater, that in itself would constitute an almighty
improvement in a part of the world that could certainly use some. Writing
about last year's Arab League summit, Jonathan Kay of Canada's National
Post noted that if Zimbabwe's election-fixing strongman Robert Mugabe had
shown up, he's have been the most democratically legitimate leader in the oom.

No one knows what regional ''reform'' will look like down the road. The
odds are not good. But they're better than the certainty of disaster that
another couple of decades of Baathism, Wahhabism, Hamas and the yatollahs
will bring. When the most prominent Saudi trust-fund baby is Osama bin
>Laden and the most famous middle-class Egyptian is Mohammed Atta nd the
only example of Arab pluralism is a Christian deputy prime minister of Iraq who enjoys gassing Kurds and lobbing Scuds at Israel as much as his
Muslim masters do, one thing is sure: The status quo is not an option.
that's the real long-term war aim of the United States?

I'd say it's this - to bring the Middle East within the civilised world.
How do you do that? Tricky, but this we can say for certain: you'll never
be able to manage it with the present crowd - Saddam, the Ayatollahs, the
House of Saud, Boy Assad, Mubarak, Yasser. When Amr Moussa,
Secretary-General of the Arab League, warns the BBC that a US invasion of
Iraq would "threaten the whole stability of the Middle East", he's missing
the point: that's the reason it's such a great idea. Suppose we buy in to
Moussa's pitch and place stability above all other considerations. We get
another 25 years of the Ayatollahs, another 35 years of the PLO and Hamas,
another 40 years of the Baathists in Syria and Iraq, another 80 years of
Saudi Wahhabism. What kind of Middle East are we likely to have at the nd
of all that? The region's in the state it's in because it's too stable.
And no-one sums it up better than the butcher of Baghdad. What dictator
wouldn't be tickled by being "monitored"? Saddam's eternal participation
in an ongoing field study of dictatorship is the reductio ad absurdum of
"stability" fetishisation, ever since the stability junkies prevailed on
Bush Sr. to leave the Saddamites in power 12 years ago. Remember last
summer, when every ten minutes somewhere on your radio or TV dial you
could hear bigshot Democrat Senator Joe Biden retelling for the umpteenth
ime a pompous little anecdote in which he explains how he's warned Bush
Jr against taking out Saddam. "Mr President," he claims to have said,
"there is a reason your father stopped and did not go to Baghdad. The
reason he stopped is he didn't want to stay for five years."

And your point isŠ? By my arithmetic, that means we'd have been out in
spring 1996. Sounds a good deal to me, after a decade of Britain and
America ineffectually bombing Iraq every week while somehow managing to
get blamed for systematically starving to death a million Iraqi kids - or
two million or whatever it's up to by now - through UN sanctions, though
funnily enough UN sanctions don't seem to have so tightened Saddam's purse
strings that he can't find 25,000 bucks to give to the family of each
Palestinian suicide bomber. More than that, he's still here. And, simply
by being still here, he's what passes for a success story in the Arab world.

Saddam will fall quickly, as quickly as the "mighty Afghan warrior,
humbler of empires" fell. What happens then is harder to predict.
Nonetheless, whoever succeeds Saddam will be an improvement. That's to
say, he will, at the very least be sufficiently non-deranged to put the
anthrax program on the back burner, attend to more pressing economic
matters and thereby set in motion a chain of events, state by state. Just
to run through a few:

Saudi Arabia
One reason why the House of Saud wants Saddam to stick around is because
the first thing a new Iraqi regime will do, liberated from UN constraints
on oil exports, is start pumping an extra couple million gallons a day.
It's a small point but one worth noting that, by keeping Saddam in power
but restricting his ability to sell oil, the west to a certain extent
punishes itself. A new regime in Baghdad, whether democratic or not, means
more oil, which means cheaper prices at the pump, which means more
pressure on the House of Saud, whose underpants get tightened a notch with
every per barrel dollar drop. Thus, Saddam's removal could be seriously
crushing. There are no good guys in Saudi Arabia - the choice is between
those who are openly pro-al-Qa'eda and those who are quietly buying them
off - but even without total internal collapse, the less money they're
getting from oil the less they have to fund Islamist recruitment in
Europe, South Asia and North America, and the more internal dissension
there is in the kingdom, the more likely their excitable young men are to
wage the jihad at home rather than abroad. Leaving Saddam as the regional
muscle man means allowing the Saudis to continue providing the ideological
heft to Islamist terrorism.

Jordan
A few months back, there were rumours doing the rounds in London and
Washington that King Abdullah has been more or less bought by Saddam, and
pretty cheaply, too. This is in the grand tradition of King Hussein's
decision to stick with his Iraqi "brother" during the last Gulf War, when
even the Syrians signed up with the Americans. It's obvious that the
longer Saddam stays in power the more Jordan will be corrupted, and
eventually we'll wind up with one more Arab sewer state. The Hashemite
Kingdom is already an important route for Iraqi sanctions-busting, and
Saddam would quite like to use it as a military highway, too. Of all the
hardline anti-Jew rejectionist regimes in the Middle East, the Saddamites
are the only ones anxious to send their troops into combat against Israel.
All that's restraining them is the Arab countries they'd have to pass
through en route. Every year Saddam stays in power increases the chance
he'll turn Jordan into a de facto colony and thruway to the battlefield.

I'm not a Hashemite romantic: when you actually sit down and try and work
out why Jordan gets such a good press, it seems to boil down mainly to the
Royal Family's taste in hot-looking westernised babes. But, if their good
points remain kinda mysterious, it's nevertheless the case that they've
got fewer bad points than any of their neighbours. Getting Saddam off the
Hashemite windpipe will be the first step in letting the most reformable
Arab regime start reforming. Leaving Saddam in power means losing Jordan.

Iran
The original Islamist nutters have spent much of the last few months
trying to keep the lid on the simmering pots of Teheran, Esfahan, Ghazvin
and other Iranian cities. If last August's popular demonstrations to mark
the 96th anniversary of the constitutional monarchy failed to blow up into
anything bigger, they did shed some interesting light on the situation.
Protesters reported that the regime's riot police were speaking Arabic.
That confirms rumours that the mullahs have hired Saudis, Iraqis and
others to do the heavy work of shooting civilians. The likelihood that a
young pro-western population will be cowed by Arab outsiders decreases
significantly after Saddam's gone: they'll no longer be the crack troops
of the regional superpower but only the despised remnants of a loser
regime. The liberation of Iraq will hasten the revolution in Iran.

The Palestinian Authority
The Palestinian people are perhaps the best testament to the defects of
stability. They've been kept in an artificially stable environment for
half a century: the faux "refugee camps" of Jenin and the like, which are
effectively UN-supervised terrorist training facilities now populated by
three generations of "refugees" who've never lived in the places they're
supposed to be refugees from. All-out war to the death would have been
preferable, regardless of who won. Either the Arabs would have got their
way and pushed the Jews into the sea or the Arabs would have been
decisively beaten once and for all. But neither scenario would have led to
the remorseless descent into depravity that the Palestinians have
accomplished in their UN-mandated limbo. The death-cult psychosis doesn't
exist in isolation: it's armed by Iran, bankrolled by Iraq, and philosophically sustained by Saudi Islamism. It will not survive the
liquidation of its state patrons. This is good news for any Palestinians
interested in actual life.

None of the above will happen without a massive humiliating military
defeat of the Arab world's Number One loonitoon. Shortly thereafter, the
Ayatollahs and ol' man Yasser will be gone, and the House of Saud, Junior
Assad and Mubarak will follow. Think I'm crazy? Look at the map the last
time we went to war with Saddam. In 1991, Afghanistan was still ommunist,
as were the Central Asian republics, and Pakistan was under the corrupt
Sharif regime. Twelve years later, General Musharraf is trying hs hardest
to be Washington's new best friend, and American forces are in
Afghanistan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and even Georgia. The Middle East's
eastern and northern borders have quietly become an American sphere of
influence. The regimes on the ground are of varying degrees of
unattractiveness, but none of 'em is causing the west any trouble. At he
very minimum, that's the way Araby will look in a couple of years. At te
best, they'll be on the path they should have embarked on after the reat
r - to liberty, the rule of law and economic prosperity. The opening
shots were fired in Baghdad on Thursday morning.

Mark Steyn is a columnist for Britain's Daily Telegraph and Canada's
National Post. The second section above is entitled "After Saddam," an excerpt from Mr. Steyn's published collection of columns, The Face Of The
Tiger.

[jegs2]

Quite lengthy -- but it does seem to hit the mark on many points, including what I've always believed to be the true reason for this war.

[EmperorChrostas the Cruel]

Many people, left, right, or center, don't seem to grasp the concept of RISK.
Banks make a RISK, every time they make a loan. Calculated risks, are necessary, to achieve ANY goal.
Only losers never gamble.

The only person who has nothing to lose is a dead one, as staying at home is not a sure way to avoid ANY risks.(Plane crash, natural disaster)
The odds of something going bad, increase, the further you get from home, and the more active you get.(Traffic accident,ect...)

With this thought in mind, it is the opinion of the leaders of the USA, that staying home, and waiting and hoping for the best, is, in fact, the RISKIEST path to follow, given the technological level needed to get WMD.

We are now in a time, when 10 grams of Anthrax can shut down huge portions of our infrastructure.

This is one of the biggest gambles taken in a while, and will make or break the next century.

The whole middle east is a festering boil, that needs to be lanced, else it will inevitably burst from the internal pressure, releasing the toxins and poisons into the blood, instead of outward, into the sepsis tray.

[Enforcer Talen]

cute metaphor.

[EmperorChrostas the Cruel]

The medacine metaphor has even more analogous points.
Hav you ever witnessed surgery?
Or the tools used?
We are talking flensing knifes, sternum crackers, pinchers, cutters, scrapers, pullers.
Needle and thread, cauterisering, staples, and glue.
The kicker is, in modern surgury, the less dammage you do,(orthroscopic) the better.

Sound familiar?

[SirNitram]

Very important points made. I dunno if it'll work like he hopes.. But I do agree it's worth a throw of the die.

[EmperorMing]

Nice read. Must find more.