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.
Who is Mark Steyn? What he says sounds positive.