Mark Steyn's Spectator column is too much fun. Sorry Ken, in it goes.
spectator.co.uk
On the right side of history
Mark Steyn takes issue with EU Marshal Chris Pétain, Stephen
Glover and other sodaphobes
New Hampshire
Say what you like about those wacky Islamofascists but at least they revile
America as the Great Satan. By contrast, to Europe, America is now and
for ever the Great Moron. So it was inevitable that, when George W. Bush
started going on about his ‘axis of evil’, this would be just another excuse
for cartoonists in the Rest of the West to depict him as a bozo in a
triangular (Iraq–Iran–North Korea) dunce’s cap. To Chris Patten, this sort
of rhetoric is unhelpfully ‘absolutist’ and in ‘unilateralist overdrive’; to
Hubert Védrine (the French foreign minister, apparently), it’s ‘absurd’ and
‘simplistic’ — on which Jo Johnson expands in these pages.
‘Fishing? Huh, sitting alone on some riverbank for hours and hours; I
can’t honestly see what the attraction is.’
The formal state-department handbook says that, on being insulted by
European grandees, administration officials should endeavour not to titter,
but even Colin Powell, Mister Moderate himself, is having a hard job
keeping a straight face. Invited to respond to Mr Patten, the general said, ‘I
shall have a word with him, as they say in Britain.’ Invited to respond to M.
Védrine, he suggested the poor fellow was ‘getting the vapours’. In neither
case did he think it was worth taking on their arguments, such as they are.
The ‘axis of evil’ is actually a pretty sophisticated construct. When the Rest
of the West protests that it’s not an ‘axis’, they’re missing the point. It’s
like the new Ocean’s Eleven: they’re not really buddies, but they’ve been
cast together in a remake of an old-time buddy caper. Ocean’s has George
Clooney, the ultimate smooth operator, Brad Pitt, the all-purpose con-man,
and Don Cheadle, the black guy who’s there to make up the numbers. In
the axis of evil, these roles are played respectively by Iraq, Iran and North
Korea, who, like Cheadle, is mainly there for ethnic variety. Iran’s on the
list just because Washington sees nothing to lose in messin’ a little with the
mullahs’ heads. As for Saddam, it’s true that Iraq doesn’t seem to have
been as directly involved in al-Qa’eda operations as, say, the Metropolitan
County of the West Midlands, or whatever Heatho-Walkerian administrative
unit Tipton is presently consigned to. But the administration intends to have
a new Iraqi president visiting Washington and sitting up in the gallery by the
time of Bush’s next State of the Union address in January (the Hamid
Karzai role’s already been cast), and, if they have to snub Chris Patten to
achieve their goal, then by jingo they’re prepared to do so.
Sixty years ago, another simple-minded absolutist was in unilateralist
overdrive. George Winston Bush was in Downing Street filling the air with
inflammatory cowboy rhetoric about ‘a monstrous tyranny never surpassed
in the dark, lamentable catalogue of human crime’. Meanwhile, on the
Continent, EU Marshal Chris Pétain was deploring this crude talk of ‘the
abyss of a new Dark Age’ as frankly unhelpful and certainly not as
effective as ‘constructive engagement’ with ‘moderate elements’ in the
Third Reich. At decisive moments in human history, someone has to be
simple, someone has to be primal. For two crucial years in the mid-20th
century, the British Empire played that role alone, and in so doing saved the
world.
This is one of those moments. If Osama had had a nuke on 11 September,
he’d have used it. Maybe Saddam wouldn’t, maybe he’d be more rational.
But, honestly, I’d rather not wait to find out. As for Iran, consider a recent
speech by Hashemi Rafsanjani, the former president and now head of the
Expediency Council, which sounds like an EU foreign-policy agency but is,
in fact, Iran’s highest religious body. Rafsanjani said that on that fast
approaching day when the Muslim world gets nuclear weapons the Israeli
question will be settled for ever ‘since a single atomic bomb has the power
to completely destroy Israel, while an Israeli counter-strike can only cause
partial damage to the Islamic world’.
Unlike Chris Pétain, I take these guys at their word. The EU supposedly
fears massive ‘destabilisation’ of the Muslim world. I say, bring it on, baby.
If we don’t destabilise them now, they’re going to be destablilising us the
day after tomorrow. The population of the Middle East is growing at a rate
six times faster than that of Western Europe, whose populations are either
stagnant or declining. Islam is turning out ever greater legions of poorly
educated young men with little or no economic opportunity at home and
every incentive to head to Frankfurt or Marseilles or Luton and drift into
Islamic terrorism while living off Euro welfare. The refusal of the
Continent’s political class to adjust its support for Yasser Arafat no matter
how many Israeli bat mitzvahs get blown up by suicide bombers may strike
many Americans as repugnant, but it has a compelling demographic logic
about it if you look at even the official figures for Muslim immigration to
Europe. If Washington isn’t getting much support for its plans to take out
Saddam now, France and Germany and co. are going to be a lot less keen
in five or ten years. If it were done, then ’twere well it were done quickly.
That’s why I find it slightly perplexing to have my colleague Matthew
Parris characterising my support for America’s war as in some way
unBritish. In the choice he posits between ‘America’ and the ‘Rest of the
World’, I bet on form. Of the 20th century’s three global conflicts — the
First, Second and Cold Wars — who was on the right side each time?
Germany: one out of three. Italy: two out of three. For a perfect triple,
there’s only Britain, America, Canada, Australia, New Zealand. Even now,
with their military capabilities shrivelled to almost nothing, the only guys
actually on the ground in any combat role with the Americans are the
British, Aussie and Kiwi SAS boys and Canada’s JTF2. I think there’s
something to be said for being on the right side of history. In that sense, in
my argument with the swelling ranks of Speccie and Telegraph doubters,
I’m not the loud-mouthed Yank; I’m the British traditionalist.
Alas, Britain is no longer as British as I am. ‘Night after night,’ wrote
Salman Rushdie in the New York Times recently, ‘I have found myself
listening to Londoners’ diatribes against the sheer weirdness of the
American citizenry. The attacks on America are routinely discounted.
(“Americans only care about their own dead.”) American patriotism,
obesity, emotionality, self-centeredness: these are the crucial issues.’
Just so. Not Our Kind Of People. Lardbutts. U! S! A! U! S! A! Healing.
Closure. Would you like fries with that? Vulgar, vulgar, vulgar. In
September, Maulana Inyadullah, one of the more quotable jihadi holed up in
the Greater Kandahar area, nailed it perfectly in this pithy soundbite for the
Daily Telegraph: ‘The Americans love Pepsi-Cola, we love death.’
The sodaphobe knew his audience well. You can almost hear Chris Patten,
Hubert Védrine, Lionel Jospin and a thousand others stampeding to agree:
‘Exactly! We hate Pepsi-Cola, too!’ I think of a telling vignette I caught on
TV one bank holiday in London a decade or so back. Sir Edward Heath had
looked in on a constituency fête and been inveigled into conducting the local
marching band. Unfortunately, they were playing ‘Hey, Look Me Over!’,
which, as I’m sure all Spectator readers will know, was introduced by
Lucille Ball in the musical Wildcat! Sir Ted held the baton like it was a piece
of dog turd as his cheery constituents blasted out Cy Coleman’s showtune
in all its brassy, confident, highstepping American ghastliness. A look of
almost physical revulsion crept across his face, as if to say, this is what
happens when you let the masses pick the programme. For someone like
Ted Heath, conservatism is as much about restraining the people’s right to
‘pursue happiness’ as liberating it.
For more than five months now, a continuous stream of preposterous
criticism of the Americans has had at its core the assumption that such a
demotic culture must necessarily be a profoundly stupid one. Yet funnily
enough, it’s the sophisticates who keep getting everything wrong: the Arab
street will rise up! Musharraf will be overthrown! The Taleban will never
surrender! Millions will starve! Thousands of Afghan civilians are dead!
(Not true: see below.) There’s evidently a powerful psychological need
among the non-American Western elites to believe that, if America is big, it
must also be blundering; if it’s powerful, it must also be clumsy; if it’s
technologically superior, it must also be morally inferior. Hence the frenzied
rush to accuse America of ‘torture’ in Guantanamo, a camp where the
medical staff outnumber the prisoners. Atrocious, eh? I bet Rose Addis is
glad she didn’t get shipped there rather than the Whittington.
In September, I wrote here that one of the consequences of that awful day
would be the end of Nato. Under Nato, America has over-guaranteed
European security, reducing the Rest of the West to the status of a neurotic
girlfriend you can never quite shake off, the sort who insists on moving
into your pad and then keeps yakking about how she needs her space.
Officially, the ROTW is side by side with America in the ‘War on
Terrorism’. In practice, its principal contribution to the team effort seems
to be sitting on the sidelines watching the Americans skate all over the rink
and then handing them a succession of cranky 4.3s. That’s where Mr
Inyadullah’s Pepsi line isn’t quite right. America is Coca-Cola, the market
leader. It would benefit from a Pepsi, a credible number two — emphasis
on the ‘credible’. Paavo Lipponen, the Finnish Prime Minister, was in
London last week and gave a speech arguing that ‘the EU must not develop
into a military superpower but must become a great power that will not take
up arms at any occasion in order to defend its own interests’. Perhaps it
lost something in translation.
As for Mr Inyadullah’s choice between Pepsi and death, Professor Glenn
Reynolds, America’s Instapundit, remarked the other week, ‘Well, it’s
January and I’m drinking a Pepsi and Mr Inyadullah is probably dead.’ So
things worked out swell for both parties. It’s only the Europeans who find
themselves agonisingly caught between Iraq and a soft drink.
A note on civilian deaths:
My colleague Stephen Glover stands by his assertion that Bush and
Rumsfeld have killed more Afghans than Osama killed Americans. This
statistic derives from the work of Marc Herold, a Women’s Studies
professor at the University of New Hampshire (my tax dollars at work, I
regret to say), whose study of civilian casualties in Afghanistan put the
death toll at a little over 4,000. John Pilger insouciantly rounded this up to
5,000, and I fully expected it to rise over the weeks as spectacularly as
Enron stock in the late Nineties..
Professor Herold’s general methodology seems to be that if, on Wednesday
morning, the Peshawar Bugle, the Baghdad Courier and the Des Moines
Register each report that 20 people were killed overnight, that adds up to a
total death toll of 60. I’d mentioned that even Human Rights Watch put
civilian fatalities at around 1,000, and Stephen Glover promptly called up a
spokesperson at HRW’s London office to chastise me for conjuring this
figure up out of thin air. ‘We’re very cross with Mark Steyn,’ she told
Stephen. ‘We’ve never released figures for civilian fatalities in Afghanistan,
nor have we speculated. It’s all utterly made-up.’
Actually, I got that figure of 1,000 from the HRW New York office, which
offered it as a ‘rough estimate’ to Murray Campbell in a Canadian Press
story of 3 January. His report appeared in several North American papers
from Toronto to Seattle, and no one from HRW went around huffing that
they were ‘very cross’ with Mr Campbell. The Associated Press, after
studying fatalities reported by Afghan hospitals and tracking down families
named in casualty reports, has come up with a civilian death toll of 600 or
more. It also quotes Afghan spokesmen who say the Taleban required them
to exaggerate numbers. Reuters estimates 1,000. The Project for Defense
Alternatives (a leftie group) reckons somewhere between 1,000 and 1,300.
Even Professor Herold has revised his figures, abandoning his total of 4,050
and now placing the total between 3,000 and 3,600. So here’s the current
Hit Parade at a glance:
Associated Press: 600
Reuters: 1,000
Human Rights Watch (New York): 1,000
Project for Defense Alternatives: 1,000–1,300
Professor Marc Herold (UNH): 3,000-3,600
The Spectator (Stephen Glover): 4,000
The Mirror (John Pilger): 5,000
Professor Noam Chomsky: 7,000,000*
(*Cautious estimate ventured in a speech in New Delhi in the middle of the
campaign; it may be higher by now.)
Right now, I’d say the balance of probability favours the
AP-Reuters-HRW-PDA end of the scale rather than the
Glovero-Pilgerian-Chomskyite end. |
