Category: History

Via Omar at Iraq the Model comes a story that goes farther than almost anything else toward explaining the reasons for the Iraq War.

It is the ultimate of ironies that the American Left would have you believe that President George W. Bush is an incompetent moron who nevertheless managed to dupe the House of Representatives into voting for war in Iraq 296-133, and the Senate 77-23. Notwithstanding that all throughout the Clinton administration, officials from the President on down repeatedly warned about Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction, when President Bush said exactly the same thing, he was lying.

In December’s Commentary Magazine, Norman Podhoretz takes another swing at this Big Lie:

Among the many distortions, misrepresentations, and outright falsifications that have emerged from the debate over Iraq, one in particular stands out above all others. This is the charge that George W. Bush misled us into an immoral and/or unnecessary war in Iraq by telling a series of lies that have now been definitively exposed.

What makes this charge so special is the amazing success it has enjoyed in getting itself established as a self-evident truth even though it has been refuted and discredited over and over again by evidence and argument alike. In this it resembles nothing so much as those animated cartoon characters who, after being flattened, blown up, or pushed over a cliff, always spring back to life with their bodies perfectly intact. Perhaps, like those cartoon characters, this allegation simply cannot be killed off, no matter what.

Nevertheless, I want to take one more shot at exposing it for the lie that it itself really is. Although doing so will require going over ground that I and many others have covered before, I hope that revisiting this well-trodden terrain may also serve to refresh memories that have grown dim, to clarify thoughts that have grown confused, and to revive outrage that has grown commensurately dulled.

I had been vaguely aware of the social problems plaguing France for some time. Off-hand remarks that there were areas of Paris the police didn’t dare venture into, for instance, and the concern over Islamic militancy in immigrant populations. Given the past week’s riots, I think this deserves more attention. Via Lileks comes some background on the situation, written 3 years ago by Theodore Dalrymple.

Even now that Iraqis have voted overwhelmingly to get on with recreating their nation, “progressives” can’t bring themselves to think well of 30 million people struggling for peace and freedom after being under a tyrant’s bootheel.

People who opposed the war in Iraq will find it hard to stomach attempts to present the referendum as a triumph.
—The Guardian

Mark Steyn has some characteristically trenchent words for them:

Sixteen out of Iraq’s 18 provinces – including Sunni-majority ones – voted for the most liberal, democratic, federal and pluralist constitution in the Middle East. Sorry to make the Guardian throw up, but that is indeed a “triumph”.

Whatever the Americans got wrong, they got one big thing right – that, if you persevered, Iraq had the potential to function as a free society in a part of the world where no such thing has ever existed.

That was a long shot, and much sneered at, not least by British “conservatives”. But Washington judged correctly: given the radicalisation of the Arab world, and the Arabification of the Islamic world, and the Islamification of much of the rest of the world, in the end you have to fix the problem at source.