Posted on 04/20/2004 10:36:59 PM PDT by Dundee
Editorial: Coalition of the whining still wrong on Iraq
APRIL 2003 was a great month for those who believed the people of Iraq should be freed from the grip of tyranny, and that if they were it would make the world a safer place. April 2004 has so far been a great month for those who believed they shouldn't, and that it wouldn't.
In the former camp are the governments of the US, Britain, Australia, Poland and the other nations who form the coalition of the willing - along with the majority of Iraqis, who still tell pollsters their lives are better now than under Saddam Hussein. In the latter group are the radical Shi'ite and Sunni factions, Baathist holdouts and al-Qa'ida blow-ins seeking with violence to undermine the transition to democracy - along with all the commentators and intellectuals in the West who opposed the original invasion on the curious principle that anything the US does must be wrong. The undercurrent of whining we heard from the Left in April 2003, as Saddam's statue fell and Iraqis cheered, has this month begun to sound like a victory anthem, as Fallujah burned and Najaf simmered.
Too soon - far too soon. It is quite true that the first half of April, in which hundreds of Iraqis and nearly 100 Americans were killed in fighting, while hostages were taken and one of them murdered by radical militias, has been the bloodiest and least successful period of the occupation so far. But a negotiated settlement to the siege of Fallujah is in progress, while in Najaf the murderous radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr has failed to ignite the popular uprising he urged among Shi'ites. Admittedly these are modest signs of progress towards stability and security, but what is most encouraging is that they have been effected by Iraqis themselves. It was members of the Iraqi Governing Council who brokered a ceasefire in Fallujah. And as revealed in a report by Peter Wilson in The Weekend Australian, al-Sadr's most dogged enemy is not US administrator Paul Bremmer but an Iraqi judge called Raid Juhy, who has painstakingly assembled a brief against the renegade cleric that includes the murder of rival cleric Abdul Majeed al-Khoei, along with theft and numerous other serious charges. The handover of sovereignty on June 30, which is what the radical factions and terror cells hope to derail, is proceeding.
This did not stop anti-US journalist Robert Fisk gleefully telling Tony Jones on ABC TV's Lateline on Monday night - in a bizarre echo of the line heard from al-Sadr and his cohorts - that "the handover is basically a fraud" because the interim government will be chosen by the US. Well, we don't know that yet, and it is in any case established that there must be free elections in Iraq by January 2005. Fisk lauded the rag-bag of extremists and terrorists making trouble in Iraq as an "anti-American resistance". Unchallenged, he pointedly referred to the four US contractors brutally murdered in Fallujah as "mercenaries". He nonsensically compared the occupation of Iraq with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict - because they are both about "two occupying forces coming up against unstoppable opposition" - and in a stunning piece of moral relativism equated both with the French occupation of Algeria. It seems the US, which has precious little history of empire-building, cannot even remain in a country long enough to set up a democracy without facing the same old accusations of imperialism.
Fisk's local soul-mates have taken The Australian to task for editorialising triumphantly on the fall of Saddam, and for debunking those who claimed Iraq would turn into a quagmire and an intifada. For the record, it was claims the invasion would take months or years, and cost hundreds of thousands of lives, that we debunked. And equally for the record, our opinion page has carried a wider range of anti-war material than rival papers. Our editorial the day after Saddam's statue toppled began "Now for the hard part", and three days later we warned that a "period of disorder" in Iraq was inevitable. It is true we did not get everything right. Neither has the US administration in Iraq, which has chopped and changed far too often, and left it too late to tell the world what sort of government will assume authority on June 30. But the noise of bombs and curfew sirens has only muffled, not stilled, the other sounds we were already hearing in Iraq: of people saying and writing whatever they pleased in 250 new newspapers and magazines, of the satellite televisions that a third of Iraqi households now own, and of oil flowing again at pre-war levels, generating nearly $20 billion this year alone for the Iraqi people. Meanwhile the predicted eruption of the "Arab street" has not eventuated, and countries such as Iran, Libya and even Saudi Arabia have become more biddable than before, both towards the West and towards internal democratic elements. The wheel's still in spin, and nobody should be celebrating anything just yet, but we remain proud of what this country and its allies have done in Iraq.
Outstanding! I can only wish we could see more of this in the lame-stream press.
EXACTLY! As Amir Taheri wrote "Anti-War or Anti-U.S.?" in the New York Post:
The rebirth of the peace movement. This is how sections of the Western media describe the marches that attracted 30 million people in some 600 cities, in 25 countries, across the globe in recent weeks. Last week, a group of "peaceniks" gathered in London to discuss ways of nursing the "reborn" child into adulthood.
By coincidence, today marks the 50th anniversary of Josef Stalin's death. The Soviet dictator was the father of the first "peace movement," which for years served as an instrument of the Kremlin's global policy. Stalin's "peace movement" was launched in 1946 at a time when he had not yet developed a nuclear arsenal and was thus vulnerable to a U.S. nuclear attack. Stalin also needed time to consolidate his hold on his newly conquered empire in eastern and central Europe while snatching chunks of territory in Iran.
Pablo Picasso, a "fellow traveler" with the French Communist Party, designed the famous dove of peace as the emblem of the movement. French poet Paul Eluard, another fellow traveler, composed an ode inspired by Stalin. The "peaceniks" were told to wear white shirts, release white doves during their demonstrations and shake their clenched fists against "imperialists and revanchistes."
Soon it became clear that the "peace movement" was not opposed to all wars, but only to those that threatened the U.S.S.R., its allies and its satellites. For example, the peaceniks did not object to Stalin's decision to keep the entire Chechen nation in exile in Siberia. The peaceniks did not march to ask Stalin to withdraw his forces from Iranian Azerbaijan and Kurdistan. When Stalin annexed 15 percent of Finland's territory, none of the peaceniks protested. Neither did they march when the Soviets annexed the Baltic states. Nor did they grumble when Soviet tanks rolled into Warsaw and Budapest, and a decade later also in Prague.
But when America led a coalition under a U.N. mandate to prevent North Korean Communists from conquering the south, peaceniks were on the march everywhere. The movement targeted Western democracies and sought to weaken their resolve against the Soviet threat.
Over the years nobody marched against any of the client regimes of the Soviet Union that engaged in numerous wars, including against their own people. The wars that China's Communist regime waged against the peoples of Manchuria, Tibet, East Turkestan and Inner Mongolia, lands that were eventually annexed and subjected to "ethnic cleansing," provoked no protest marches.
Even when China attacked India and grabbed Indian territories the size of England, the peace movement did not budge.
In the 1960s the movement transformed itself into the campaign for unilateral nuclear disarmament. Here, unilateral meant that only the Western powers had to give up their arsenal, thus giving the Soviets a monopoly on nuclear weapons. The peaceniks spent much of the '60s opposing U.S. intervention in Vietnam.
The 1980s gave them a new lease on life, as they focused on opposing American Pershing missiles in Western Europe. The Pershings represented a response to Soviet SS-20 missiles that had already been stationed in central Europe and aimed at Western European capitals. But the peaceniks never asked for both the Pershings and the SS-20s to be withdrawn, only the American missiles. President Ronald Reagan's proposal that both the SS-20s and the Pershings be withdrawn was attacked and ridiculed by the peaceniks as "an American Imperialist trick." Francois Mitterrand, then France's Socialist president, put it this way: "The missiles are in the East but the peaceniks are in the West!"
No peacenik, not even Joschka Fischer, now Germany's foreign minister, marched in support of tearing down the Berlin Wall and allowing the German nation to regain its unity. All that is now history. The "evil empire" of communism has gone for good, but the deep anti-West sentiments that it promoted over the decades remains. It is this anti-West, more specifically anti-American, sentiment that provides the glue of the new peace movement.
Last month, the British daily The Guardian asked a number of peaceniks to explain why they opposed the use of force to liberate Iraq? The main reason they felt they had to support Saddam Hussein was that he was disliked by the United States. When the Tanzanian army invaded Uganda and removed Idi Amin from power, no one marched because the United States was not involved. When the Vietnamese army invaded Cambodia and changed the Khmer Rouge regime there, no one marched. Again, the United States was not involved.
When French troops invaded the Central African Republic and changed its regime, again no one marched. The reason? You guessed it: America was not involved. And what about a march in support of the Chechens? Oh, no, that won't do: The United States is not involved. The peace movement would merit the label only if it opposed all wars, including those waged by tyrants against their own people, not just those in which America is involved.
Did it march when Saddam Hussein invaded Iran? Not at all. Did it march when Saddam invaded Kuwait? Again: nix! (Later, they marched, with the slogan "No Blood for Oil," when the U.S.-led coalition came to liberate Kuwait.) Did it march when Saddam was gassing the Kurds to death? Oh, no.
Stalin died 50 years ago to the day. But if he were around today he would have a chuckle: His peace movement remains as alive in the Western democracies as it was half a century ago.
Iranian author and journalist Amir Taheri is based in Europe. E-mail: amirtaheri@benadorassociates.com
Check out Robert Fisk's outrageous comments to an Australian audience.
To Freepers exposing the lies of unethical "journalists" - and sharing that news with others - THANK YOU!
We are winning ~ the bad guys are losing ~ trolls, terrorists, democrats and the mainstream media are sad ~ very sad!
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