Democrats Can’t Handle The Truth
Mark Steyn has a great a great column today: Dems
determined to ignore progress in Iraq.
These sad hollow men may yet get their way — which is to say they may succeed
in persuading the American people that a remarkable victory in the Middle East is
in fact a humiliating defeat. It would be an incredible achievement. Peter Worthington,
the Canadian columnist and veteran of World War II and Korea, likes to say that there’s
no such thing as an unpopular won war. The Democrat-media alliance are determined
to make Iraq an exception to that rule. In a week’s time, Iraqis will participate
in the most open political contest in the history of the Middle East. They’re building
the freest society in the region, and the only truly federal system. In three-quarters
of the country, life has never been better. There’s an economic boom in the Shia south
and a tourist boom in the Kurdish north, and, while the only thing going boom in the
Sunni Triangle are the suicide bombers, there were fewer of those in November than
in the previous seven months.Meanwhile, Iraq’s experiment in Arab liberty has had ripple effects beyond its
borders, pushing the Syrians most of the way out of Lebanon, and in Syria itself significantly
weakening Baby Assad’s regime. Saad Eddin Ibrahim, who’s spent years as a beleaguered
democracy advocate in Egypt, told the Washington Post’s Jim Hoagland the other day
that, although he’d opposed the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq, he had to admit it
had “unfrozen the Middle East, just as Napoleon’s 1798 expedition did. Elections in
Iraq force the theocrats and autocrats to put democracy on the agenda, even if only
to fight against us. Look, neither Napoleon nor President Bush could impregnate the
region with political change. But they were able to be the midwives.”The Egyptians get it, so do the Iraqis, the Lebanese, the Jordanians and the Syrians.
The choice is never between a risky action and the status quo — i.e., leaving Saddam
in power, U.N. sanctions, U.S. forces sitting on his borders. The stability fetishists
in the State Department and the European Union fail to understand that there is no
status quo: things are always moving in some direction and, if you leave a dictator
and his psychotic sons in business, and his Oil-for-Food scam up and running, and
his nuclear R&D teams in places, chances are they’re moving in his direction.
Keep ignoring the truth democrats and just hope your friends in the media keep shilling
for you. When this thing is all over, democrats will have no one to blame but themselves.
I also know they will try and take credit for success but the record has been
set. Democrats chose the losing side. Democrats are invested in losing. Democrats
will get their wish.