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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Graystone who wrote (108480)	7/28/2003 9:39:55 AM
From: LindyBill	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Perhaps I have a hearing problem. I will listen carefully to your answer LindyBill, heheheh You are like all the rest of us here, GS. Your mind is already made up and is not going to change. Sullivan's column in the London Time's yesterday answers your question better than I could. No Apologies The Iraq War Was Well Worth It By Andrew Sullivan There was something wonderfully strained about how various news organizations dealt last week with the news of the deaths of Qusay and Uday Hussein. From the BBC to Reuters, there was palpable - if sternly repressed - dismay. One of the first headlines that the Baathist Broadcasting Corporation put out on the news was: "US celebrates 'good' Iraq news." The quotation marks around "good" did not refer to any quote or source in the text. They were pure editorializing on behalf of the BBC, whose campaign to undermine the liberation of Iraq is now in full swing. It was not clear to the BBC that the deaths of two of the most sadistic mass murderers on the plant was in any way a good thing, especially if they redounded to the credit of Tony Blair or George Bush. And immediately, of course, pundits started to criticize the U.S. action as "extra-judicial," as a violation of the law against assassination, and so on. Their immdiate impulse on hearing this terrific news was: how can we spin this against Blair and Bush? Commentators on the popular American left-wing website, Democratic Underground, were more explicit about how they felt: "Doesn't a part of you wish that Queasy and Duh-day were alive? I'll admit they're scum and rightfully so, but anything that lands as even more humiliation on W's grotesque shrivelled face is that much the better. It's sad, really, that as despicable as they are, Saddam's family seems to be the lesser of two evils when you compare them to the wretched little bastard occupying the White House and destroying America in the process..."To be fair, this guy was upbraided by other posters. But he wasn't alone. Here are two others: "What I really hate about the way our government has been taken over is that I'm at the point where I almost DON"T want anything good to happpen in Iraq, I WANT them to screw up, I WANT them to fail." Another vented: "Bush and his ilk are far, far worse than Saddam and his two degenerate brats, and that's saying a LOT."Yes, it is saying a lot, but the anti-war hysteria that has crept over the British and American press in the last few weeks has tended to obscure the reality of what is actually going on in Iraq. The New York Times, for example, which has become far less tendentious since the exit of its deranged former executive editor, Howell Raines, nevertheless still refers to the contract killings and Baathist remnants' murders of small numbers of U.S. soldiers as "an uprising." It also refers to the American and British presence in Iraq as an "occupation." You get the idea. Colonial powers opposed by restless population. Far more congenial to anti-war types than: Liberators still opposed by remnants of totalitarian regime. But all the evidence in Iraq points to something else: an extraordinarily successful war followed by slow but measurable progress in putting back together again a brutalized and fractured country. Think back for a moment to what we once feared might happen in the aftermath of a war to depose Saddam. Here are some of the predictions, cited last week by Paul Wolfowitz: civil war; destroyed oil wells; environmental catastrophe; famine; a refugee crisis; and the possibility of cleaning up after chemical and biological attacks. None of this happened - in large part because of the astonishingly innovative and swift war plan. The most staggering result is that Kurds, Shia and Sunnis are still on board for a united, democratic country. But instead of reporting on this achievement, the press, which in large part opposed the war in the first place, has done all it can to turn this success into a "quagmire." Yes, there are obvious problems. The electricity grid has proven hard to get back and running again; the capitulation of the Baathist thugs in the war means that many dead-enders are still at large and doing all they can to inflict damage in American troops in order to weaken resolve in the U.S.; we over-estimated the need for troops and under-estimated the need for trained policemen in the aftermath of conflict; we were too slow to recruit Iraqis for internal security forces; and so on. These are all forgivable mistakes. But they are all remediable; and steps are being taken to ensure that obvious problems are tackled and resolved. But no one - no one - can or should deny that the lives of average Iraqis are now immensely better than they were under a vicious totalitarian state. I don't know about you, but with every new mass grave being discovered, with every gruesome torture chamber unearthed, with every children's prison exposed, the more obvious it is to me that this war was not just morally defensible; it was morally essential. By and large, it seems, understandably skittish Iraqis agree. The most reliable poll done in Baghdad - more troubled than regions to the Shiite South or Kurdish North - found a steady majority of Iraqis want the allies to stay and view the future as more promising than the past. As to security, for all its problems, the current situation certainly compares favorably to, say, the chaos in liberated Germany after the Second World War where military casualties mounted as die-hard Nazis made their last stand. But somehow I don't remember the Western media describing those isolated Nazi remnants as an "uprising." But then, in those days, the Western media wasn't quietly hoping for the allies to fail. Why, I keep asking myself? It's perfectly legitimate to question - aggressively - the fallible intelligence that was used in part to justify the war. But to use such an inquiry to undermine the current attempt to rebuild Iraq is to compound forgivable government failure before the war with the desperate need for allied success after it. To replay the war debate now is a fatal distraction from the vital work at hand. Even if you disagreed with the war, it is utterly unfair to the Iraqi people now to use their future and their lives as pawns in a domestic political squabble. Yet some would try to do exactly that. Their agenda needs to be resisted just as firmly as the cowardly attacks by Baathists in Iraq. For they serve the same purpose: the demise of democratic promise in Iraq and the collapse of the West's long and difficult war against terror. We can afford neither. And it's past time petty politics ceased in the face of that reality.