The Seesaw Buckles [Mark Steyn]

It was sobering, on reading the recent flurry of letters in this newspaper under the heading “Balancing The US Debate”, to discover that it was this column that had single-handedly unbalanced it. “If Steyn represents the American right, where is the spokesperson for the American left?” demands Conor McCarthy of Dun Laoghaire. The hitherto perfectly poised seesaw of press coverage of the United States is apparently all out of whack because my corpulent column is weighing down one end while on the other up in the air are the massed ranks of Irish Times correspondents, RTE, the BBC and 97% of the European media class, plus Anthony O’Halloran, who opined in these pages a few days ago that “anyone who cares to visit a small town in the Midwest will encounter what can only be described as ultra-right-wing thinking.” Prof O’Halloran didn’t cite any examples of this “ultra-right-wing thinking”, secure in his assumption that most readers would know the sort of thing he had in mind.

As the ne plus ultra of unbalanced right-wing thinkers, it’s not for me to suggest how the US debate might be balanced in these pages. I have only one theory on column-writing, which is this: at a certain basic level, a columnist has to be right more often than not, otherwise the reader (I use the singular advisedly) is just wasting his time. If I were Robert Fisk, the famed foreign correspondent with decades of experience in the Muslim world, I’d be ashamed to leave the house. Sample Fisk headlines on the Afghan war: “Bush Is Walking Into A Trap”, “It Could Become More Costly Than Vietnam”. Sample insight on the Iraq war: when the Yanks announced they’d taken Baghdad International Airport, Fisky insisted they hadn’t and suggested they’d seized an abandoned RAF airfield from the Fifties by mistake. It’s this kind of unique expertise that has made him so admired around the world, not least in Ireland.

By contrast, readers of this column may have gained the impression that George W Bush will win the Presidential election on November 2nd. If he doesn’t, I shall trouble readers of this newspaper no further. It would be ridiculous to continue passing myself off as an incisive analyst of US affairs after I’ve been exposed as a deluded fool who completely misread the entire situation. In the bright new dawn of the Kerry Administration, you’d deserve better. If that’s not an incentive for Irish citizens to smuggle a few illegal campaign contributions the Senator’s way, I don’t know what is.

But, if, on the other hand, Bush is re-elected, I make one small request of the Irish and European media: you need to re-think your approach to this Presidency. Consider, for example, the two elections this weekend: Afghanistan and Australia. In the former, they held the first direct Presidential election in the country’s history. Hitherto, if you wanted to become President of Afghanistan, you had to hang around till the incumbent’s term expired, which was generally when he did, usually at the next guy’s hand. King Zahir was deposed in 1973 by his cousin Daoud, who was killed by his successor Taraki, who was suffocated by his successor Hafizullah Amin, who was executed by the Soviets, who installed Babrak Karmal, who died in a Moscow hospital but in a rare break with tradition managed to outlive his replacement, Najibullah, whom the Taliban wound up hanging from a traffic post. So, in a break with tradition, Hamid Karzai is now the first elected head of state in the country’s history.

And yes, it was a flawed election: it emerged on polling day that the indelible ink used to mark voters’ thumbs could be rubbed off. And whose fault is that? Well, the election was managed by the UN, which evidently got its indelible ink from the book-keeping department of its Oil-for-Food program. That’s one more reason, in case we needed any, to dismantle the UN and all its bloated works. But, UN incompetence aside, Afghanistan is making steady progress, no thanks to the media naysayers, who assured us nearly three years ago that Karzai was little more than a ceremonial Mayor of Kabul and as soon as one of his many enemies got a good shot at him the country would be plunged back into its 1980s chaos. He represented nobody, he spoke for nobody. Robert Fisk again, in March 2002: “Hamid Karzai can scarcely control the street outside his office.”

Oh, really? Events in Afghanistan seem to be going Bush’s way, rather than Fisk’s.

Same in Australia, where John Howard’s conservative coalition was re-elected. It was supposed to be close, but Howard won comfortably, prefiguring similar victories to come by his fellow doughty warriors of the Anglosphere, Bush and Blair. Had Australia’s government gone the way of Spain’s, you can bet CNN and co would have played it up as a big loss for Bush, in the same way that they focused on those smudgy Afghan thumbs rather than the joyous Afghan faces – the young women voting for the first time on a polling day almost wholly free of violence.

This was a remarkable weekend, but also a typical one, in that all the movement is in Bush’s direction. For a supposed “unilateralist” who’s turned “the world” against America (the basic Kerry indictment), he has a lot more reliable pals right now than, say, Jacques Chirac. The French President’s closest ally, Gerhard Schroder, is unlikely ever again to be booking the room for an election-night victory party. Some US presidents are content to enjoy the perks of office and treat their term as one long holiday weekend (Clinton); others see their task as one of managing historically inevitable decline (Carter) or living with an unsatisfactory status quo (Eisenhower). But Bush, like Reagan, is a transformative president. By the time he leaves office in 2009, the world will be very different.

And that’s all I’m asking for after November 2nd – that the Euroleft chuck the tired gags about “Shrub” the moron, the idiot, the stupid white man that saw them through his first term. Stow the pop psychology, too – the cracks about the “daddy complex” that supposedly led him to topple Saddam. It’s already obvious the 43rd Presidency is far more consequential than the 41st: George Bush Sr’s place in history will mainly be as the guy who warmed up the name for George Bush Jr. If you’re not prepared to give serious thought to the challenge Bush poses to the UN and EU complaceniks, you’re never going to understand the times we live in.

If Kerry wins, I’m outta here. If Bush wins, eschewing lazy European condescension for the next four years would be the best way of “balancing the US debate”.

It's a reasonably safe bet. The only problem is that if Steyn loses he will keep his word, but if the whining leftists lose, they will go right on whining. So it's a bit like betting $5 against $0.

An outstanding Steyn column. I am astonished at the prevalence of stereotypical thinking within the European media - a proposition may or may not be true, but it's certain that they'll all be parroting it simultaneously. This does not augur well for "diversity" no matter what lip service is paid that postmodern icon. What it does for "sophistication" need hardly be commented on.

But it is amusing that some seem to regard Steyn's opinions as "unanswered." Fish don't notice the water, either.

Thanks for posting this.

readers of this column may have gained the impression that George W Bush will win the Presidential election on November 2nd. If he doesn’t, I shall trouble readers of this newspaper no further.

He seems to be addressing his comments to that particular paper's readership while leaving out the other papers he writes for.

"Some US presidents are content to enjoy the perks of office and treat their term as one long holiday weekend (Clinton); others see their task as one of managing historically inevitable decline (Carter) or living with an unsatisfactory status quo (Eisenhower). But Bush, like Reagan, is a transformative president. By the time he leaves office in 2009, the world will be very different."

- Don't ya just love it. Historians will write volumes on each of these Presidencies, but Steyn tells you all you need to know about five of them in two sentences.
As for Steyn's promise to quit the Irish Times if Bush loses, I sense a certain loss of patience recently in his writing, especially for publications across the pond. Perhaps he's getting static from editors (Steyn reports that for the first time in his career, the London Daily Telegraph refused to publish his last column.); perhaps Steyn is getting a lot of hate mail from Irish readers, I don't know. However, he's clearly lost patience with the EU mindset, he's mad as hell, he's not going to take it anymore and he's putting it all on the line.

It doesn't really matter if Mark Steyn stops writing for 'The Irish Times'... 'The one man global content provider' can run, but he can't hide from his loyal readers ! Viva la internet !!

Mark Steyn is proof positive that Canada's pulse is still beating. Whether he writes about politics or stage & cinema, his columns are invariably witty and illuminating.

I loved this little history lesson:

Hitherto, if you wanted to become President of Afghanistan, you had to hang around till the incumbent’s term expired, which was generally when he did, usually at the next guy’s hand. King Zahir was deposed in 1973 by his cousin Daoud, who was killed by his successor Taraki, who was suffocated by his successor Hafizullah Amin, who was executed by the Soviets, who installed Babrak Karmal, who died in a Moscow hospital but in a rare break with tradition managed to outlive his replacement, Najibullah, whom the Taliban wound up hanging from a traffic post. So, in a break with tradition, Hamid Karzai is now the first elected head of state in the country’s history.

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