Posted on 12/29/2003 9:44:43 AM PST by Rummyfan
STEYN'S YEAR Looking back at 2003
NOTE: We'll be posting more links to the cited columns as soon as the chaps at The Spectator get back from their two-week Brit Xmas and notice that their website's been down since December 23rd.
PREDICTION OF THE YEAR The Spectator, March 29th I’m writing this a few hours before deadline. So by the time you read this Saddam may have won. That would seem to be the upshot of the BBC coverage we get over here, not to mention dear old Reuters. As Douglas Hamilton reported, "U.S. military prowess suffered another setback in Iraq on Monday and another omen that bullets rather than liberators' garlands may await the invasion force when it finally reaches Baghdad." “Omen”? Well, speaking as someone not privy to the entrails of the Reuters chicken, let me go out on a limb here: the Anglo-Aussie-American forces will win.
BIG PREDICTION (PRE-WAR) The Spectator, March 8th “I couldn't help wiping some tears of happy emotion from my cheeks when I read Mark Steyn's predictions of a golden future not only for the people of Iraq, but also for the whole Arab world,” wrote Dr Franz Metger of Nuremberg on our letters page the other week. “Alas, my forecasts are slightly less optimistic. The more likely scenario in, say, a year's time is this: Baghdad - and, of course, the oilfields - will be controlled by a 'democratic' government that has to be protected by a substantial international support force - international, as by then the US forces will have moved on to the next target on President Bush's hit list. The rest of the country will be left to the mercy of local mighties and will descend into a mire of corruption and tribalism. Everybody will wonder what has happened to Saddam Hussein - is he dead, is he hiding? - and the queues in front of the recruiting offices of al-Qa'eda et al. will have tripled.” Really? I’d say in a year’s time – March 2004 – US troops will still be in Iraq, and any international forces will not include the French and Germans, whose presence would be grossly offensive to the Iraqi people. The Kurdish north will be at least as democratic, uncorrupt and untribal as it is now, and the south won’t be far behind. Saddam will be confirmed dead or in custody. And, as for the recruiting offices of al-Qaeda, Dr Metger’s proverbially explosive Arab street will turn out to be more like Acacia Gardens in Pinner. That’s my view of a year from now. Want to put money on it, Herr Doktor?
NOTE: The good Doktor declined to put his Euros where his mouth is.
BIG PREDICTION (POST-WAR) The Daily Telegraph, April 12th * “The head of the World Food Program has warned that Iraq could spiral into a massive humanitarian disaster" (The Australian, April 11th) No such disaster will occur, anymore than it did during the mythical "brutal Afghan winter" and its attendant humanitarian scaremongering.
* "Iraqis Now Waiting for Americans to Leave" (Associated Press, April 10th) There will be terrible acts of suicide-bomber depravity in the months ahead, but no widespread resentment at or resistance of the Western military presence.
* "Rather than reforming the Muslim world, the conquest of Iraq will inflame it" (Jeffrey Simpson, the Toronto Globe And Mail, April 10th). Despite the best efforts of Western doom-mongers to rouse the Arab street, its attitude will remain: Start the jihad without me.
WRONG! The Sunday Telegraph, March 2nd Roman Polanski will not be receiving an Oscar to go with his brand-new Bafta and his Palme d’Or.
WRONG AGAIN! The Spectator, April 5th We're still on Cakewalk Time, which I would define as weeks rather than months - in other words, if the new Saladin and his unconquerable army have been conquered in eight weeks or less, that's a mildly elongated cakewalk. If Baghdad falls within the next seven to ten days, that's a quickstep cakewalk.
NOTE: I was way off. It wasn’t seven to ten days. Baghdad fell within six days.
WRONG (OR PREMATURE) The Chicago Sun-Times, June 22nd 2003 It’s mullah time! The question now is whether Iran’s ayatollahs and the original “Islamic republic” can survive the summer, or whether President Bush will mark the second anniversary of September 11th with two-thirds of his axis of evil consigned to the trash can of history.
I SPOKE TOO SOON The National Post, March 3rd It never ceases to amaze me that a guy like me can make a living in Canadian newspapers.
BOOK OF THE YEAR The Daily Telegraph, June 21st Well, the big day is here! Around the world this morning, bookstores opened their doors and millions of customers who’d spent the night waiting patiently in long lines eagerly stampeded to the counter and said, “Here’s the copy of Living History I bought last week. I’d like my money back, please.”
Now scroll down the page for a meander down memory lane month by month, concluding with some predictions the jury's still out on...
JANUARY RIGHT: Despite the fondest hopes of the “peace” movement, the actual war in Iraq will be no more of a “quagmire” than Afghanistan was. But this phony war is already a big boggy quagmire, in which every casus belli is seized on by America’s “allies” as a casus for yet another deferment. The Spectator, January 25th NO GUNS IN BRITAIN It’s always easier to hassle the cranky farmer with the unlicensed shotgun than the Yardies with the Uzis. Aston is the logical reductio of British policing: rival bad guys with start-of-the-art hardware, a cowed populace, and a remote constabulary tucked up in bed with the answering machine on. The Sunday Telegraph, January 5th
NO DONGS IN KOREA For the most part, Kim would be selling his cut-price Dongs to groups who are anxious to use them. The moment they do, and the provenance is traced, North Korea’s role as quartermaster to the world’s wackos will be over. In the Middle East, nukes would elevate Saddam to invulnerability. In North Korea, they’re the death spasm of a state with no raison d’etre. The Spectator, January 11th
THE NAYSAYERS Twenty years ago, the realpolitik crowd thought a democratic South America was a fantasy and that we had to cosy up to the strutting little El Presidentes-for-Life. Today, the same stability junkies tell us we have to do the same with Boy Assad and co. They’re wrong again. They always are. The National Post, January 16th
IN SEARCH OF THE MODERATE MUSLIM Yesterday, my colleague Alice Thomson yoked together paedophilia and terrorism “hysteria”, and seemed pretty certain that, just as showbiz personalities and scoutmasters are being unfairly tarred with the paedophile brush, so Algerians and Muslims in general are getting a bum rap on terrorism. Well, I dunno. Since September 11th, the only thing I know for certain about western Muslim populations is how little I know… According to the Office of National Statistics, 20 babies born in Britain since September 11th have been given the name Osama. That seems a lot to me, but perhaps to Alice it’s a reassuringly small number. But the truth is neither of us knows. And, as with Kate Winslet’s bottom, there’s an awful lot of airbrushing going on. The Daily Telegraph, January 18th
THE ANTI-WAR MOVEMENT HAS NO CLOTHES One woman bore a picture of some female genitalia – possibly hers, the provenance was obscure – over the caption “This Bush Is For Peace”. Another waxed eloquent: “Trim Bush.” Out in Marin County somewhere, other bushes for peace disrobed, lay down on a hillside, and formed the words “No War”. I wonder if there are any conflicted nudists, with a bush for Iraq and a rack for Bush. The Spectator, January 25th
ROE v WADE CELEBRATES 120 TRIMESTERS The assumption behind judicial activism is that the guys in the fancy robes are ahead of the curve: Being more educated, intelligent and sophisticated than the unwashed masses, our judges reach today the positions that the grunting, knuckle-dragging public won't come round to for another decade or so. But eventually we will, and we'll wonder what all the fuss was about. Well, America has had constitutionally mandated abortion absolutism for a third of a century, and it's further away from broad social acceptance than ever. The National Post, January 27th
MONKEY BUSINESS France is admirably upfront in its unilateralism: it reserves the right to treat francophone Africa as its colonies, Middle Eastern dictators as its clients, the European Union as a Greater France and the UN as a kind of global condom to prevent the spread of the American virus. All this it does shamelessly and relatively effectively. It's time the rest of the west was so clear-sighted. The National Post, January 31st
FEBRUARY RIGHT: If M Chirac’s vision of Europe prevails, we can pretty much guarantee, from his performance this last month, how the UN, Nato, the ICC, and all the rest will develop. Therefore, it is necessary that he emerge from the ruins of Saddam’s presidential palace as dazed and diminished as possible. The National Post, February 13th THE COLUMBIA FALLS TO EARTH This will not be as traumatising as the Challenger disaster. The yellow-ribbon era died with September 11th: even if their TV networks haven’t quite adjusted, Americans are tougher about these things; this is a country at war and one that understands how to absorb losses and setbacks. What happened happened most likely because the Columbia was just so damn old and rusty. If anything, it symbolizes not American “arrogance”, but what happens when the great youthful innovative spirit of the country is allowed to atrophy. The Sunday Telegraph, February 2nd
AT THE SECURITY COUNCIL A few days ago, I said this thing was getting like Monica: by the time you're in Year Two, no smoking gun is ever quite smoking enough… If the Powell evidence made anything plain, it's this: The idea of "monitoring" a dictator is ludicrous. Saddam is quite happy to participate for another decade or two in an eternal ongoing U.N. field study of dictatorship. National Review, February 5th
At its inception, the UN reflected the realities of the World War victory parade; from the Fifties to the Eighties, it reflected the realities of the Cold War stalemate; now it reflects not the new reality – a unipolar world dominated by a hyperpower – but the denial of that fact. For most of the participants in yesterday’s meeting, the UN is not a reflection of geopolitical power but a substitute for it, a means by which the Lilliputians can tie down the Texan Gulliver. The National Post, February 6th
Some of those UN abstainers believe the world would be a genuinely better place if it was run through global committees staffed by a transnational mandarin elite of urbane charmers: that's an undemocratic concept, and one shouldn't be surprised that it finds itself in the same voting lobby as the dictatorships. In an ideal world, you'd like the joint run by Mary Robinson and Chris Patten, but at a pinch Gaddafi and Assad will do: transnationalism is its own raison d'etre. If the postwar UN was a reflection of hard power, the present-day UN is a substitute for it. The Spectator, February 8th
CONTAINMENT STRATEGY Armando Iannucci, countering the hawks' argument that Saddam is stalling and "this can't go on for ever", put it this way: "Wait a minute. This may sound stupid, but why can't it go on for ever? What precisely are the disadvantages of this form of stalemate going on for a very, very long time?" Why not ask an Iraqi what the disadvantages of stalemate are? As far as Saddam's subjects are concerned, the "peace" movement means peace for you and Tony Benn and Sheryl Crow and Susan Sarandon, and a prison for them… Marching for "peace" means marching for, oh, another 15 years of Saddamite torture and murder, followed by a couple more decades under the even more psychotic son, until the family runs out of victims to terrorise, gets bored and retires to the Riviera. The Daily Telegraph, February 15th
EURABIA WATCH Those of us who talk of reforming Iraq are assured by our opponents that it’s preposterous to think that Arabs can ever be functioning citizens of a democratic state. If that’s so, isn’t that an issue, given current immigration patterns, not for Iraq tomorrow but for Britain, France, Belgium and Holland right now? The Spectator, February 22nd
MARCH RIGHT:Last May, I predicted that Bush would invade Iraq before the end of August. I was wrong as usual. Instead, the President was prevailed upon to “go the UN route”, as a sop to Colin Powell, and to provide Tony Blair with some multilateral cover. And now that we’ve reached the season finale of this interminable, unwatchable unreality show – “I’m A Superpower, Get Me Out Of Here” – the end result is that we’ll be going to war with exactly the same participants as we would have done last August, and the one person weakened by going the UN route is the very one it was designed to protect: Mr Blair. The Daily Telegraph, March 15th THE BUTCH SOUNDBITE This artful formulation – that war with Iraq is a distraction from the war on terror – was designed to enable Democrats to oppose Bush without sounding like a bunch of sissies on national security. The war with Germany is distracting us from the war with Japan. The Spectator, March 8th
FEMINISTS FOR CHATTELS! If we have to have an incoherent, self-loathing “peace” movement, then women showing off their hooters in support of a culture that would stone them to death for showing off their ankles is about as good as it’s gonna get. The Daily Telegraph, March 8th
THE ROAD TO PEACE RUNS THROUGH GUINEA I was impressed by the news that President Bush has been working the phones to Guinea, mainly because I had no idea Guinea had any phones to work. My local directory does not list any code for the country, there apparently being nothing to dial between Guatemala and Guyana. I believe you can call Mali and they’ll pop next door and pass on the message. You can certainly dial New Guinea (675), but the one we’re looking for is, as Don Rumsfeld would say, old Guinea. The Daily Telegraph, March 15th
RUMMY'S WORLD Other politicians sweat for weeks over a major 90-minute policy speech, hire the best writers, craft memorable phrases, and nobody notices. If you want to “re-shape the debate”, as the cliché has it, all you need is a casual aside from Rummy. The concept of “old Europe” barely existed until Rumsfeld used it as a throwaway line a month and a half ago. Within a week, it became the dominant regional paradigm. Belgium – Old Europe. Bulgaria – New Europe. The entire map of the continent suddenly fell into place for the first time since the Cold War. The Sunday Telegraph, March 16th
WAR! Back in Baghdad, The Independent’s Robert Fisk told his readers on Thursday: “At the Alastrabak grocery store, I bought 25 loo rolls.” Ah, the bog of war. When we Bush poodles say, “Let’s roll!”, this is definitely not the kind of roll we have in mind. Fisk is either settling in for a long siege or padding his expenses, but I can’t say this strikes me as a 25-roll war. The Daily Telegraph, March 22nd
WEAPON OF MASS DESTRUCTION “Smart bombs have their place,” conceded Eurobigwig Chris Patten last year, “but smart development assistance seems to me even more significant.” So far, the smart bombs in “Shock And Awe” have been pretty smart... Indeed, given the way Mr Patten’s “smart development assistance” to Yasser Arafat appears to have wound up funding the intifada, America’s smart bombs now cause fewer deaths than the EU development budget. The Spectator, March 29th
MEDIA QUAGMIRE After little more than a week, is this war coverage in trouble? ... King Philip VI of France says, “When I signed on to the Hundred Years War, I thought it would be over in 120, 140 tops. Nobody told me we’d be committing for over two centuries. So I understand the media’s impatience. But you know, what looks bad on Day Four doesn’t seem such a big deal when you’re in Year 137. The Daily Telegraph, March 29th
MICHAEL MOORE: OSCAR DE LA RANTER Somehow the notion persists that an Upper West Sider adored on the Cote d’Azur is the authentic voice of bluecollar America. The vast bulk of his credibility in this regard derives from his vast bulk. Less of Moore would be a career disaster; he’d be just another cadaverous limousine liberal nibbling on his curly endive. The Sunday Telegraph, March 30th
APRIL RIGHT: A chronically harassed, understaffed, underequipped system reaches reflexively for routine diagnoses, prescriptions. Did Kwan Sui-Chu’s doctor, an Asian Canadian herself with many Asian patients, get the Toronto Public Health alert on SARS? Why, after Scarborough admitted Mr Pollack, whom they knew to have been infected on his last trip to the hospital, did they allow Mrs Pollack to circulate among other patients? Most of what went wrong could have been discovered by a few social pleasantries: How’s the family? Been traveling recently? The so-called “bedside manner” isn’t just to cheer you up, it’s meant to provide the doctor with information that will assist his diagnosis. In Canadian health care, coiled tight as a spring, there’s no room for chit-chat: give her the antibiotics, put it down as a heart attack, stick him on a gurney in the corridor for a couple of days... In most other western health care systems the things Ontario failed to do would be taken for granted. There might be a lapse at some point in the chain but not a 100% systemic failure all the way down the line. The National Post, April 24th QUAGMIRE UPDATE This war is over. The only question now is whether a new provisional government is installed before the BBC and The New York Times have finished running their exhaustive series on What Went Wrong With The Pentagon's Failed War Plan. The Daily Telegraph, April 5th
THE BRUTAL AFGHAN WINTER HITS THE IRAQI NATIONAL MUSEUM The National Museum fell victim not to general looting but to a heist, if not an inside job, for which the general lawlessness provided cover... The desecration of Mesopotamia’s legacy took place not in the last ten days but in the last four decades. What’s important about a nation’s past is not what it keeps walled up in the museum but what it keeps outside, living and breathing as every citizen’s inheritance. The Jerusalem Post, April 22nd
FIVE-SAR RESTAURANT When something bad happens in Canada, the priority is to demonstrate how nice we are. After September 11th, the Prime Minister visited a mosque. After SARS hit, the Prime Minister visited a Chinese restaurant… Personally, I’d have been more impressed if he and Aline had had a candlelit dinner for two over a gurney in the emergency room of a Toronto hospital. That’s the issue – not Canadian restaurants, but Canadian health care. The National Post, April 24th
MULTILATERAL SOLUTION The UN doesn't solve problems, it manages them in perpetuity: it turns them into Les Miserables; come back two decades later and it's still running. The Spectator, April 5th
WAR CRIMES WATCH Will the Belgian government approve the complaint against Tommy Franks for “genocide”? The petition accuses the General of “inaction in the face of hospital pillaging”, which apparently meets the Belgian definition of genocide. Unlike the deaths of over three million people, which is the lowball figure for those who’ve died in the current civil war in the Congo – or, as I still like to think of it, the Belgian Congo. The Spectator, April 26th
MAY RIGHT: The sack of the Iraqi National Museum is shaping up to be this year’s Jenin “massacre”, with the numbers of missing objets being dramatically revised downward by the hour. Perhaps some enterprising Hollywood producer can combine the three great terrors of the last two years – the “brutal Afghan winter”, the Jenin “massacre”, the sack of Baghdad – into one almighty disaster movie. The Jerusalem Post, May 8th SPEAKING OF QUAGMIRES How would you feel if you were Putin? Your guys kill more people in a single Moscow theatre than Bush’s do liberating Baghdad. Bush wraps Iraq up in a month, while you’ve spent years killing hundreds of thousands and reducing Grozny to rubble and your boys are still coming home in boxes. The Daily Telegraph, May 3rd
POUR ENCOURAGER LES AUTRES You don’t invade Iraq in order to invade everywhere else, you invade Iraq so you don’t have to invade everywhere else. But, if you do, the message from Iraq is that it’s over before it starts. The Jerusalem Post, May 6th
THE CABAL OF CABALS But if I had to name my all-time favourite cabal to which Bush is in thrall it would have to be the one revealed in a long think-piece in The Boston Globe the other week. The Globe identified the various murky figures who’ve been the most assiduous promoters of the new American imperium: David Frum, the Bush speechwriter who coined the phrase “axis of evil”; Charles Krauthammer of The Washington Post; Michael Ignatieff of Harvard; and Mark Steyn, some loser with a Brit newspaper. And what do all these unsavoury characters have in common? Circumcision? Gefilte fish? No; as the Globe noted, “Frum, Steyn, Krauthammer, and Ignatieff all hail from Canada.” The Daily Telegraph, May 10th
JUNE RIGHT: First, there is no chance of Iraq winding up an Islamist theocracy. None. Zero. Secondly, there is no possibility of a Ba’athist renaissance. There are no “Ba’athist elements” – not in the sense of any kind of viable organized political resistance. There are disaffected elements who were once bigshot Ba’athists and are now trying their hands at a little freelance banditry. But they’re no long-term threat and no-one who wasn’t also on the Saddamite payroll wants them back. Dictatorships, no matter how long they last, rarely put down roots. And, when they’re gone, it’s as if they were never there (Tito’s Yugoslavia springs to mind). The country either reverts to what it was before, or it becomes something entirely different. That’s the choice Iraq faces. The Sunday Telegraph , June 1st MOTORING ROUND THE SUNNI TRIANGLE I’ve spent the last couple of weeks on a motoring tour of western and northern Iraq, and I can’t recommend it highly enough. The roads are empty except for the occasional burnt out tank and abandoned Saddamite limo. You can make excellent time, as it will be several months before a deBaathified Iraqi Highway Patrol squad is up and running and even longer before they replace the looted radar detectors. On the boring stretches of desert motorway you can liven things up by playing D-I-Y contraflow. And best of all, if you avoid Baghdad and a couple of other major cities, you’ll find the charming countryside completely unspoilt by western reporters insisting that America is “losing the peace”. The Sunday Telegraph, June 1st
DANGLING CHAD Dominique de Villepin, the ubiquitous Frenchman, declared the other day that Paris was indispensable to post-war reconstruction because it had so much experience in Africa. I don’t know about you, but I think Iraq deserves better than to be the new Chad or Ivory Coast. The Spectator, June 7th
LOSING THE PEACE Peter Worthington, the Canadian columnist and veteran of World War Two and Korea, likes to say that there’s no such thing as an unpopular won war. Tell it to Downing Street. If I understand correctly, the British, having won the war, are now demanding a recount. Across the length and breadth of the realm, the people are as one: now that the war’s out of the way we can go back to bitching and whining that Blair hasn’t made the case for it. The Sunday Telegraph, June 8th
CANADIAN QUAGMIRE Toronto is not only more culturally desecrated than Iraq it’s also more diseased. There have been 238 cases of SARS in Toronto, with 32 deaths. There have been 66 cases of cholera in Basra, with three deaths. Basra public health officials, assuming there are any, are doing a much better job of controlling cholera than Toronto public health officials are of controlling SARS. The Ontario health guys, who sound more like a gung-ho Chamber of Commerce, keep announcing they’ve got SARS licked and then it goes and infects a big bunch of new hospital patients. And meanwhile the Canadian media keep raving about what a great job the Toronto health care folks are doing, and then return to ululating about the massive humanitarian catastrophe about to engulf Iraq. The Daily Telegraph, June 14th
LIVING HISTORY STILLBORN From the moment they met, Hillary knew he "had a vitality that seemed to shoot out of his pores", but not a lot shoots out in these pages… Monica's book came out first, and to be honest it captures Bill's oozing pores better than his wife's does. Monica's Bill is the Lounge-Lizard-In-Chief: "He undressed me with his eyes." Hillary's Bill is a clunky wonk: "While I was challenging discrimination practices, Bill was in Miami working to ensure McGovern's nomination." Monica says, "The irony is that I had the first orgasm of the relationship." Hill's account reads like she's still waiting. The Sunday Telegraph, June 15th
MASSIVE SHORTAGE OF HUMANITARIAN DISASTER However much “raw sewage” is actually getting pumped into the Tigris and Euphrates, it’s never going to be enough to cause a genuinely widespread public health crisis – no matter how much Will Day of CARE International would like one. “How long will it be before we see this contamination seriously affect the health of the population?” Seriously? Never. The Spectator, June 21st
COURT-MANDATED CELEBRATION OF DIVERSITY As a general rule, the more noisily an institution proclaims its commitment to diversity, the more slumped in homogeneity it gets – at least when it comes to the only diversity that matters, not diversity of race or gender or orientation, but diversity of ideas... “Diversity” doesn’t extend to, say, some dirtpoor piece of fundamentalist white trash. Her presence wouldn’t “enrich” anyone. “Diversity” means “more blacks”. That’s why traditional African-American colleges are exempt from its strictures: as 100% black schools, they’re already as diverse as you can get. The Chicago Sun-Times, June 29th
Well, anyway, old Reuters.
Dan
BOOK OF THE YEAR The Daily Telegraph, June 21st Well, the big day is here! Around the world this morning, bookstores opened their doors and millions of customers who’d spent the night waiting patiently in long lines eagerly stampeded to the counter and said, “Here’s the copy of Living History I bought last week. I’d like my money back, please.”
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