A 'must read' refresher about an issue not as old as Roe v. Wade
THE DEFEATICRATS
Hands up everyone who thinks Iraq’s a quagmire.
Not the Iraqi people. According to the latest polls, 70% think “life is good”, and 69% are optimistic that things will get even better in the year ahead. For purposes of comparison, they took a similar poll in Europe a while back: 29% of the French said they were optimistic about the future, and 15% of Germans.
Also from that ABC poll: 63% of Iraqis feel “very safe” in their own neighbourhoods, which is more than the residents of Clichy-sous-Bois can say.
Well, okay, those cheerful Iraqis are probably Shi’ites and Kurds and whatnot. How about the Sunnis? For a small minority group that held a disproportionate and repressive grip on power for decades, they’ve been getting a more solicitous press from western “liberals” than the white Rhodesians or South Africa’s National Party ever got.
But it turns out, after their strategically disastrous decision to stay home last January, the Sunnis are participating in Iraq’s democratic process in ever greater numbers.
Oh, okay, so the Shi’ites and Kurds and Sunni are feeling chipper, but in the broader Middle East the disastrous neocon invasion has inflamed moderate Arab opinion against America.
Well, it’s true the explosive Arab street finally exploded the other day. 200,000 Jordanians protested in Amman, waving angry banners and yelling, “Burn in hell, Rumsfeld” and “You are a coward, Bush”. Whoops, my mistake. They were yelling, “Burn in hell, Zarqawi” and “You are a coward, Zarqawi”. If you want to hear someone yelling “You are a coward, Bush”, you’ve got to go to Cindy Sheehan’s stake-out. And, in fairness to the network news divisions, it may be because so many of their camera crews have taken up permanent residence at the otherwise underpopulated Camp Cindy that they were unable to cover what was the largest demonstration against terrorism ever seen on the streets of the Middle East.
Oh, well. So the Shi’ites and Kurds and Sunni Iraqis and the Arab street’s on board, but come on, what about the insurgents? Everybody knows they’re winning.
Er, apparently they don’t. The Baathist diehard insurgents have split from the foreign al-Qa’eda insurgents. While the latter denounced the Iraqi election as “a Satanic project”, the Saddamite remnants urged Sunnis to participate and said they’d protect polling stations from attacks by the foreign terrorists in order that citizens could vote for their approved candidates (the leftover bits of Uday and Qusay, stuck on a tailor's dummy and now running on the Psychotic Dictatorship Nostalgia Party ticket). This division between the foreign nutcakes and the domestic nutcakes is the biggest strategic split over the insurgency since Joe Lieberman respectfully distanced himself from Nancy Pelosi.
On the other hand, it does belatedly prove the anti-war crowd’s long-held view that Saddam’s secular Baathists and Osama’s theocrat terrorists would never collaborate, even if it took until last month for the participants themselves to get wise to it. And, alas, unlike the Dems with Hillary, in the Sunni Triangle there’s no Sunni triangulator to craft a more nuanced position to hold both the Lieberbaathist and Pelosama wings together.
So the Shi’ites, Kurds, Sunni, the Arab street, and the Baath Party have figured Iraqi democracy’s winning. That leaves al-Qa’eda.
Not exactly. Ayman Zawahiri, the Number Two honcho in al-Qa’eda while they’re maintaining the polite fiction that bin Laden’s still functioning, recently rapped Zarqawi over the knuckles and called on him to cut out killings that “the masses do not understand or approve”. The twitchy Mr Zawahiri was presumably thinking of, for example, the assassination of the septuagenarian grand imam of Fallujah for urging Sunnis to get out and vote.
So the Shi’ites, Kurds, Sunni, the Arab street, the Baath Party and bin Laden’s deputy think the insurgency’s a bust. Hands up who thinks it’s winning.
Well, there’s Howard Dean: “The idea that we are going to win this war is an idea that unfortunately is just plain wrong.”
As I said, the article is a 'must-read' refresher on the issue.
See the rest at: http://www.steynonline.com/index2.cfm?edit_id=24
Hands up everyone who thinks Iraq’s a quagmire.
Not the Iraqi people. According to the latest polls, 70% think “life is good”, and 69% are optimistic that things will get even better in the year ahead. For purposes of comparison, they took a similar poll in Europe a while back: 29% of the French said they were optimistic about the future, and 15% of Germans.
Also from that ABC poll: 63% of Iraqis feel “very safe” in their own neighbourhoods, which is more than the residents of Clichy-sous-Bois can say.
Well, okay, those cheerful Iraqis are probably Shi’ites and Kurds and whatnot. How about the Sunnis? For a small minority group that held a disproportionate and repressive grip on power for decades, they’ve been getting a more solicitous press from western “liberals” than the white Rhodesians or South Africa’s National Party ever got.
But it turns out, after their strategically disastrous decision to stay home last January, the Sunnis are participating in Iraq’s democratic process in ever greater numbers.
Oh, okay, so the Shi’ites and Kurds and Sunni are feeling chipper, but in the broader Middle East the disastrous neocon invasion has inflamed moderate Arab opinion against America.
Well, it’s true the explosive Arab street finally exploded the other day. 200,000 Jordanians protested in Amman, waving angry banners and yelling, “Burn in hell, Rumsfeld” and “You are a coward, Bush”. Whoops, my mistake. They were yelling, “Burn in hell, Zarqawi” and “You are a coward, Zarqawi”. If you want to hear someone yelling “You are a coward, Bush”, you’ve got to go to Cindy Sheehan’s stake-out. And, in fairness to the network news divisions, it may be because so many of their camera crews have taken up permanent residence at the otherwise underpopulated Camp Cindy that they were unable to cover what was the largest demonstration against terrorism ever seen on the streets of the Middle East.
Oh, well. So the Shi’ites and Kurds and Sunni Iraqis and the Arab street’s on board, but come on, what about the insurgents? Everybody knows they’re winning.
Er, apparently they don’t. The Baathist diehard insurgents have split from the foreign al-Qa’eda insurgents. While the latter denounced the Iraqi election as “a Satanic project”, the Saddamite remnants urged Sunnis to participate and said they’d protect polling stations from attacks by the foreign terrorists in order that citizens could vote for their approved candidates (the leftover bits of Uday and Qusay, stuck on a tailor's dummy and now running on the Psychotic Dictatorship Nostalgia Party ticket). This division between the foreign nutcakes and the domestic nutcakes is the biggest strategic split over the insurgency since Joe Lieberman respectfully distanced himself from Nancy Pelosi.
On the other hand, it does belatedly prove the anti-war crowd’s long-held view that Saddam’s secular Baathists and Osama’s theocrat terrorists would never collaborate, even if it took until last month for the participants themselves to get wise to it. And, alas, unlike the Dems with Hillary, in the Sunni Triangle there’s no Sunni triangulator to craft a more nuanced position to hold both the Lieberbaathist and Pelosama wings together.
So the Shi’ites, Kurds, Sunni, the Arab street, and the Baath Party have figured Iraqi democracy’s winning. That leaves al-Qa’eda.
Not exactly. Ayman Zawahiri, the Number Two honcho in al-Qa’eda while they’re maintaining the polite fiction that bin Laden’s still functioning, recently rapped Zarqawi over the knuckles and called on him to cut out killings that “the masses do not understand or approve”. The twitchy Mr Zawahiri was presumably thinking of, for example, the assassination of the septuagenarian grand imam of Fallujah for urging Sunnis to get out and vote.
So the Shi’ites, Kurds, Sunni, the Arab street, the Baath Party and bin Laden’s deputy think the insurgency’s a bust. Hands up who thinks it’s winning.
Well, there’s Howard Dean: “The idea that we are going to win this war is an idea that unfortunately is just plain wrong.”
As I said, the article is a 'must-read' refresher on the issue.
See the rest at: http://www.steynonline.com/index2.cfm?edit_id=24
posted by CultMan at 6:56 PM
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