Bruce Thornton: The Purple Finger. Iraqis know freedom’s knock better than our liberal media

The election last Thursday in Iraq, the third since the U.S. invaded, is an astonishing historical event in the Muslim Middle East...

...Yet with some few exceptions, the American media have done a poor job of telling us why this vote is so historically important, why it is such a remarkable achievement, and why the administration deserves credit for making it happen. Having opposed the war and the President from the start, the media’s coverage has relentlessly accentuated the negative, offering nit-picking analyses even as the bullets are flying, and asserting the failure of the effort before the job is even halfway done. Then, after two-and-a-half years of this doom and gloom, the media have the impudence to crow that support for the war has dropped among the American people.

I wonder if support would be higher if the media had just given the successes of this war the same space they give the setbacks. For example, what would have been the effect on public opinion if the media had given the same attention to heroes that they give to casualties? We have seen numerous heart-rending stories about dead soldiers and their families, with the New York Times publishing photos of each of the dead. But what about the inspiring stories about heroes and medal-winners? Why aren’t the names and pictures of every Silver Star and Navy Cross winner, and their stories, as emphasized and publicized as the names and stories of the dead?

...For most of the media, our service men and women are interesting only as victims whom we pity, the subtext being that they are pathetic, well-meaning dupes of a war-mongering administration exploiting their naïve patriotism and professionalism

Bruce Thornton:

...If there is a criticism to be made of this administration, it is that it has not made it clear that the responsibility and burden for success in Iraq lie not with us but with Iraqis, not to mention the neighboring Muslim regimes that have barely lifted a finger to support their co-religionists. Why didn’t Jordan, for example, after Zaraqawi engineered the murder of its citizens, send a battalion of soldiers to help hunt down him and his fellow terrorists in Iraq? We know the answer: a critical mass of Jordanians, many of whom believe Israel was behind the attacks, would have erupted in fury that their government was aiding “crusaders,” “Zionists,” and “imperialists.” We should be publicly shaming every day all the governments in the Middle East that sat back for years as a dictator brutalized Muslims, and that now have done nothing to aid the Western forces that, as they did in Kosovo and Somalia and Kuwait, have rescued millions of Muslims.
For decades we have heard the excuses for Middle Eastern dysfunction that put the blame on imperialism, colonialism, neo-imperialism, neo-colonialism, Zionist cabals, autocratic American stooges, petro-corporate skullduggery, “Orientalism,” and any number of Marxist swamp-fever hallucinations. After Iraq, these excuses will be exposed as the feeble rationalizations they are. Once the U.S. has spent billions of dollars and the precious lives of its citizens to remove an oppressive thug, rebuild the country, and give it freedom — in short, after America has created the conditions that will allow an Arab Muslim people to join the 21^st century, their failure to take advantage of that opportunity will be their own responsibility.
Maybe then we will stop taking seriously the excuses such as “poverty” and “despair” and “Palestinian misery,” drop the “religion of peace” and “moderate Islam” rhetoric, and start speaking the truth about why the Middle East is such a mess: a religious culture that puts fanatical loyalty to its arrogant intolerance ahead of freedom, human rights, and peaceful coexistence with others.

Nailed It!

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