Regards, Ivan
Posted on 04/09/2003 5:01:06 PM PDT by MadIvan
Yesterday, the television viewers of the world watched the film version of Shelley's famous poem Ozymandias. The poet imagines a broken statue of a great tyrant from "an antique land". His "shattered visage" lies nearby with its "wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command".
On the pedestal is written: "My name is Ozymandias, king of kings. Look upon my works ye mighty, and despair!" No such words were inscribed on the statue of Saddam Hussein that Iraqis and Americans pulled down in central Baghdad yesterday, but the message for the Arab world could not have been clearer: you do not have to live under tyrannies - all your dictators should despair.
This joyous moment recalls the deposition of scores of statues of Lenin all over eastern Europe at the end of the Cold War. For a generation, the people had been enslaved. Some in the West claimed that this was not enslavement at all, rather the rule of a great revolutionary ideology, but most of the people who had actually lived under it knew better.
They knew that the ideology, itself repellent and extreme, had become a cloak for a mafia power. They pulled down the symbols of that power. That is what they did in Baghdad yesterday. Let us hope that similar symbols will soon be coming down in Teheran and in the sister Ba'athist regime in Damascus.
Although the campaign is not quite complete, it can already be said that this three-week war is a military triumph. Even without the expected assistance of Turkey in moving coalition forces into the north of the country, the Rumsfeld plan worked.
Using half the number of troops deployed in the 1991 Gulf war, the coalition swept deep into Iraq in days. Instead of flattening Iraq with overwhelming force, it hit, for the most part, precise targets. Horrible though all civilian casualties are, the predictions that there would be hundreds of thousands of them have been proved absolutely wild, as have the notions of long drawn out and hideous street-fighting in the cities.
So convinced was the BBC that America could not easily capture the capital that its reporters on the spot last weekend continued to deny that this was happening even as US tanks rolled through the streets, only the latest example of a coverage by a corporation whose bias, inaccuracy and defeatism have been truly lamentable.
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The Iraq that the coalition has all but conquered is a badly damaged nation, but the damage has been inflicted much more by the dictatorship of a quarter of a century than by the attack of the past three weeks. With courage, skill and, in the great majority of cases, restraint, the British and American forces have achieved all their goals.
As the Iraqi people came to see that this time, unlike in 1991, we meant what we said, they have laid aside the fear that held them back and are now delighting in the change of regime. Those who said that "patriotism" would make Iraqis support Saddam as Russians supported Stalin in the Second World War have been confounded.
No one should persuade themselves that all Iraqis love Britain and America, but all should recognise that these two nations have given the Iraqi people an opportunity that they want and that has until now been denied them - the chance, at least, of living in a free country.
The Islamic world is emphatically not a monolith that seeks only the destruction of Israel and the confusion of America. Just like Europe, it has many different nations, races and tribes, with conflicting aspirations. Unlike Europe, it is a wounded political civilisation in which rule is almost a synonym for exploitation. It cannot assuage its hatreds, whether in the matter of Palestine or in Iraq, or Syria or Iran or Saudi Arabia, without a better politics.
Iraq now has the chance to find that politics. This will prove much harder even than the war itself. It is imperative that the allies do everything they can to empower the Iraqi people. This means the beginnings of democracy and political pluralism, embracing the returning exiles, such as Ahmed Chalabi, instead of snubbing them.
It means also a resolute refusal to make compromises with the remnants of the Ba'ath Party and an equally great determination to exclude the UN from any of the political aspects of post-war reconstruction. As for friends of Saddam Hussein such as Jacques Chirac and the Russians, how dare they even venture an opinion about the future of the free Iraq that they have so resolutely opposed?
What is so exciting about the victory in Iraq is that it proves that Western leaders who act with imagination and courage can achieve much. George W Bush is constantly attacked in Europe for being stupid and narrow, but it was he, confronted by the huge shock of September 11, who was the first Western leader to understand how the world has changed.
It was he who started to ask all the painful but necessary questions about the power of terrorism and its state sponsors. It was he who was prepared to challenge the orthodoxies of the foreign policy elites whose only answer to the problems of the Muslim world was an ever more desperate search for "moderates" within the established governments and yet another Middle East "peace plan" to be agreed between people who were not prepared to negotiate in good faith. The dreadful stagnation and cowardice of Western foreign policy have been replaced by something much stronger and more hopeful.
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Tony Blair, too, deserves much credit. Coming from a party largely devoted to the illusions of internationalism in foreign policy, he has had much more to learn than a Republican president, and he has been brave and bold in embracing the new thinking. He has also taken a huge political risk for a cause in which he believes.
As a result, he has restored Britain's standing in the world to a position that it has not held since the Berlin Wall came down, and he has won the right, which should be denied to all other major European leaders except for José María Aznar of Spain, to help create the new world order that George Bush senior promised, but that George Bush junior is delivering.
In doing so, his success should embolden him further to break with the advice that he receives from the Foreign Office. Why is he still being encouraged to "mend fences" with France, lend his prestige to Bashar Assad in Syria, let Jack Straw seek deals with Iran, try to get the old Europe back on board with the new Europe and America that it has so deliberately offended?
In the past month, Britain has proved its political and military independence, its global reach and its capacity for decisive action. These are huge benefits, not to be squandered on "multilateralism" and assuaging the hurt feelings of the EU and the UN.
But today is, above all, the day of the people of Iraq. We shall learn much more in the coming weeks of the appalling details of how they have been murdered and tortured and crushed. We shall discover more of the grotesque privilege with which Saddam and his friends surrounded themselves as they robbed their own people. We may even unearth information about the corrupt friendships that existed between Saddam and many prominent politicians in Europe.
Gradually, there will be unveiled the complete portrait of a tyranny, with its lies, its cronies, its apologists, its cruelties, its appalling power. The more we see, the more we shall know that we were right to invade, and the more the world will want to help the Iraqi people move towards the freedom and peace that our great Anglo-Saxon civilisation takes for granted.
Regards, Ivan
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Thought we needed to see it!
Tia
It came out all in one chunk! Tia
"My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look upon my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
-Percy Bysshe Shelley 1792-182
To me this has been dejavu all over again. Reagan was attacked the same way in Europe. They save their Nobel Peace prizes for guys like Arafat, Mandela, and Carter. American values(Brits too I hope) and European values haven't been this far apart for generations, too bad for Europe IMHO.
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