Posted on 04/17/2003 3:23:34 PM PDT by Gangchen_gonpo
THANK YOU, MR. BUSH... AND MR. BLAIR
By Oetkur Umit
"Henny-Penny, the sky is falling," is probably an Americanism not familiar to most foreigners, or even to many native English speakers. Donald Rumsfeld, the US Secretary of Defense, spoke those words at a press conference on April 11 in response to newspaper reports of looting in Baghdad. Readers of children's stories would recognize the cautionary tale of "Chicken Little" who runs around the barnyard screaming, "the sky is falling, the sky is falling" after an acorn falls on his head.
The fearful chicken tells his "fowl friends," Henny Penny, Ducky Lucky, Goosey Loosey, and Turkey Lurkey about this calamity and they all go running to tell the king that "the sky is falling". On the way they meet Foxy Loxy who leads them to his den where they are never heard of again. Mr. Rumsfeld applied this children's story with avuncular exasperation to journalists who were agitating about the anarchy reigning in Baghdad after the cowardly flight of Saddam Hussein's regiments. To the architects of the invasion of Iraq, the doomsday press was raining on their parade.
The televised images of the last days of the Iraqi regime shook the foundations of conventional wisdom. Images of Iraqis dancing in the street, tearing down statues of Saddam Hussein, waving to US troops, carrying placards of support for the American President and the British Prime Minister, all boggled the mind. Naysayers warned that the Iraqi people would resist the US invasion of Iraq with fierce urban street fighting, that the elite Republican Guard and the fearful Fedayeen Saddam, using human shields and guerrilla tactics, would fight to the last man, woman and child.
What happened to the showdown at Desert Gulch? Where did the Iraqi troops vanish to? And how was it possible that an Iraqi could spontaneously declare, "Thank you, Mr. Bush" before cameras that broadcast this gratitude to the world? To the western press it seemed difficult to believe that Iraqis could be saying, "Thank you for liberating my country, thank you for ridding us of a dictator, thank you for bringing the hope of democracy and freedom to our people. Thank you Marines and Expeditionary Forces for laying down your lives for the liberation of others. Thank you Mr. Bush and Mr. Blair."
The liberal media must be livid that their prognostications of doom have gone sour. They now seem to be focusing on any calamity or personal tragedy to prove that the liberation of Iraq was a failure. So they focus on the casualties of the war and the looting following the collapse of the regime. They also repeat the mantra, "Where are the weapons of mass destruction?" as if the continuing absence of WMD was proof enough that the war was fundamentally unjustified. This verdict by media has already been handed down without waiting for weapons inspectors to continue the investigation of up to 3000 potential WMD sites, at last unhindered by a regime playing a shell game of hide and seek.
Some commentators blamed sanctions for the instability of Iraqi society, not wanting to face the fact that the root cause of instability in Iraq was the dictatorial regime of one man and his family of thugs. State terrorism does not breed stability. Cut the head off a chicken and the body of a repressed society will run amok. The looting of public buildings could actually be justified as the return of property stolen by the state from the people. In some countries this would have been called compensation for material losses and damages, if some of the loot hadn't been priceless, irreplaceable archeological treasures. As elated emotions return to normal, one can expect that law and order will be restored to Baghdad's streets, hospitals and public facilities. An interim military rule will in time transition to an Iraqi democracy, stronger for having thrown off the shackles of tyranny.
The real conflict of "Operation Iraqi Freedom" was fought on both political and ideological ground, waged as much in closed summit chambers as on BBC and CNN. The ideological battle is being fought between journalists, commentators and politicians who oppose Mr. Bush's attempts to use the US military to make the world a safer place from terrorists. These opponents of American foreign policy cannot believe that Americans could possibly be altruistic; their motives for war must lie in pools of oil.
Jay Leno, the US comedian, made light of the fact that the invasion of Iraq could not be called "Operation Iraqi Liberation" because the acronym would spell OIL. Many believe that oil was the root cause of the conflict. At least it would explain France's and Russia's erratic behavior in opposing the war in an effort to maintain their oil contracts with Saddam's hefty reserves, second in the world after Saudi Arabia. Now that the war is virtually over there will be no guarantees for these countries to renew their oil contracts unless the UN steps in.
President Bush's detractors are determined to paint the liberation of Iraq in a negative light. Pictures of bodies in shrouds, the bleeding wounded in makeshift clinics, children with head bandages, these are the images media moguls want to project to discredit the invasion of Iraq. The critics who accused President Bush of being indecisive for not committing to war in Iraq are the same who warned that the invasion in Iraq would turn into a bloodbath for the coalition troops. They are the same who said that Saddam was ready for a stiff fight, the same who would not be shocked and awed by the precision bombing of Baghdad, the same who presented anti-war demonstrations around the world as a serious voice of opposition rather than an example of the effective online organization of anti-globalists,.
These are the commentators who are now providing pictures of looters, doctors guarding hospitals with guns, and vigilante mobs beating up suspected regime sympathizers. They never photographed the faces of those who suffered or disappeared under Saddam Hussein's brutal regime. They forgot the numbers who died in Stalin's gulags or the names of those who attempted to cross the Berlin Wall. They forget those who suffered in Romania under Ceaucescu, or the French Resistance fighters who were tortured by Nazis. They conveniently forgot that regions as far as Siberia were involved in a 45-year old Cold War between two ideologies, with one ideology - free-market democracy - emerging as the victor. They also forgot the televised image of two towers crashing down with 3000 people inside, brought down by fanatics in the name of a violent, heretical Islam.
There is no doubt that war is terrible. No sane person wants war. In a fallen world, however, war is inevitable, even between brothers, and the goal of civilized countries is to make war as humane as possible. The civilization represented by a democratic west seeks to avoid war, but where war is inevitable technology is harnessed to create precision missiles and smart bombs, and the humane treatment of prisoners of war. The technology is reasonably successful, if you compare the difference between the bombing of Baghdad and the razing of Grozny, the Chechen capital destroyed by Russian Federation troops using less sophisticated weaponry.
The hypocrisy of nations knows no bounds. Russian President Putin, who voiced opposition to the war together with French President Jacques Chirac and German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, called for UN involvement in a post-war Iraq in order to avoid a new US colonialism. Perhaps President Putin was comparing the prospect of a new colonialism with the presence of the old colonialism still resident in the world. Putin seemed to ignore the fact that Chechnya has been a Russian colony for 300 years.
The fact that China still maintains Tibet and Xinjiang under a colonial rule is rarely mentioned in United Nations circles. Turkey protests the involvement of Kurdish troops in the liberation of Iraq, fearful of a free and independent Kurdistan arising out of the ashes of Iraq. Turkey still hearkens to its past glory as seat of the Ottoman Empire when a Turkish Islamic caliphate ruled the Middle East. Today the Kurds are the last remnant of a people subjugated under the Ottomans, and the Kurds are still repressed as an ethnic minority within modern Turkey. It would be a travesty if the liberation of Iraqis was won at the cost of Kurdish freedom.
The conclusion of the Iraqi war is that the left-leaning media is out of step with the reality in Iraq, indulging a distorted worldview that assumes that US military force reveals US imperial ambitions. The record shows that nations who have lost to the US are better off in every way after their conflict with the US than before. Japan and Germany, chief beneficiaries of the Marshall Plan, are the prime example, but Panama, Granada and Afghanistan can also be held up as successful models of military intervention. Those that did not lose but achieved a diplomatic stalemate are the worse off for not having surrendered unconditionally, to wit Vietnam, Somalia and Iraq after the first Gulf War.
There are of course continued questions that must be faced squarely. To their credit the media is asking the hard questions, even if they are doing it with excessive hand wringing and "Nervous Nellie" hysteria. Can the hi-tech army transform itself into the compassionate conveyors of humanitarian aid? Can units trained to seek and destroy become traffic cops and storehouse security guards? The future of Iraq, the stability of the Middle East, the next stage in the war on terrorism, the US economy, stupid, can it sustain global nation building and send my kid to college? These are all good, hard questions addressed by the "Chicken Littles" of CNN and BBC.
The question of the next step for US foreign policy is key. If the US foreign policy wonks and defense planners were able to justify a war in Iraq, which in fact was not unilateral but involved a "coalition of the willing", then what other conditions will justify war? How many tyrants must topple before the world is safe, and which dictator deserves to be invaded? One can justify a policy that requires a case by case offensive plan, or advocate for a broader standard of democratic hegemony, or even stake a claim for the realpolitik of a global superpower exercising its prerogative of power.
After all, if the US is the uncontested champion of the world by merit of its economic and military power, why not use this opportunity of history in the advancement of democratic values and commercial interests. Other world powers in the past have done worse.
The consequence of this position however, is akin to a bear fighting in a pit of dogs. The bear is stronger than any one dog, but together the pack can attack the bear from all sides, inflicting wounds until the bear is worn down and can be dispatched without ceremony. This seems to be the strategy of those jealous of US superpower, mainly the French, Germans, and Russians, or those like the Arab world, who see Israel as the root of all evil with the US as its trunk. The US may consider other avenues for global intercourse in the squabbling, dysfunctional family of nations. Military aggression and a perceived haughty unilateralism will not assure a safer world for the US, no matter how many terrorist regimes are overthrown by crack troops and slick weapons.
A more diplomatic course of action, perhaps balanced by the judicious use of arms (in order to keep the hawks happy), can in the long run move the world towards a global peace composed of nations in dialogue rather than in discord. If the US already holds a substantial stake in the United Nations budget, it should nurse this investment towards higher returns. Somewhat ironically, the US and the UK will end up footing most of the bill in any UN peacekeeping operation in Iraq, since the US contributes 22% of the UN general budget and 25% of the peacekeeping operations budget. The UK contributes about 5.4%, an amount lower than Germany and France, but still substantial.
For now, however, we must thank Mr. Bush and Mr. Blair for their contribution to the advance of freedom in the overthrow of a particularly annoying tyrant. Thankfully, the sky is no longer falling on Iraqi heads, though the tough and thankless work of bringing a new order to Iraq and peace in the Middle East still lies ahead. Without invoking apocalyptic jeremiads, Damascus lies on the road to Jerusalem, a road that passes the Valley of Megiddo where prophets say the biblical battle of Armageddon will be fought at the end of history. "Henny Penny, the sky is falling!"
However, usually quite a few dogs would rather ally themselves with the bear.
It is not something we should ever forget and has indicated clearly who our friends and enemies are.
Despite this, and many of our liberal/marxist major media and some of the anti-American and seditious protests ... we have prevailed and stand, once again, by the Grace of God and the professionalism of our forces, on the top of the heap. We should proceed to make heaps of the rest of these terrorist nations and send the strongest warning possible to all of their abettors.
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