Free Republic
Browse · Search
News/Activism
Topics · Post Article

Skip to comments.

Mark Steyn: Iraq has never had it so good
The Spectator (U.K.) ^ | 03/27/04 | Mark Steyn

Posted on 03/25/2004 6:21:36 AM PST by Pokey78

One year after the war began, Mark Steyn believes that anyone who looks honestly at liberated Iraq must see it as a success story

New Hampshire

Before we get on to the breezy assertions and specious arguments, here are ten facts about Iraq today:

1) Saddam Hussein is in jail, his sons are in ‘paradise’, and of the 52 faces on the Pentagon’s deck of cards all but nine are now in one or the other of those locations.

2) The coalition casualties in February were the lowest since the war began.

3) Attacks on the Iraqi oil pipelines have fallen by 75 per cent since last autumn, and crude oil production in British-controlled southern Iraq is at 127 per cent of the target set immediately after the war.

4) The prewar potable water supply — 12.9 million litres — has been doubled.

5) The historic marshlands of southern Iraq, environmentally devastated by Saddam, are being restored, and tens of thousands of marsh Arabs have returned to their ancient homeland.

6) Public healthcare funding in Iraq is more than 25 times higher than it was a year ago and child immunisation rates have improved by 25 per cent.

7) Iraq’s only international port has been modernised and desilted so that it is now able to take large ships without waiting for the tide, and daily commercial aircraft departures are 100 times higher than prewar.

8) School attendance in Iraq is 10 per cent higher than a year ago.

9) Despite Saddam emptying his prisons of cutpurses and other ne’er-do-wells just before the war, coalition authorities report that crime in Basra has fallen by 70 per cent.

10) The interim Iraqi constitution is the most liberal in the Arab world. I don’t think it’s possible for anyone who looks at Iraq honestly to see it as anything other than a success story. Not perfect by any means, but a year after the war was launched the glass is at least five-eighths full, and by any objective measure Iraq is immensely improved. If you belong to Not In Our Name or Environmental Choreographers Against Genocide or Spaniards For A Quiet Life or Former Tory Cabinet Ministers United For A Saddamite Restoration, you can dispute that assessment. But in doing so you’re at odds with the Iraqi people. In the most recent national survey — by Britain’s Oxford Research International — 56 per cent of Iraqis said their lives were much or somewhat better than a year ago, while 19 per cent said they were much or somewhat worse. Seventy-one per cent of Iraqis expect their lives to be better still a year from now and only 6.6 per cent expect them to be worse.

Many Iraqis are voting with their feet. The UN High Commission for Refugees, which was expecting about two million new refugees to flee from the war last year, instead found no takers. All the traffic’s the other way, and the UN is now closing down its camps around Iraq’s borders owing to lack of business. The other day, the UN’s Ashrafi Camp in Iran, after 30 years as the largest Iraqi refugee facility, threw in the towel when the last refugee went home. Despite being advised by UNHCR that it was unsafe to do so, a million Iraqis are said to have gone back. Not bad for a country which in Saddam’s day was the fifth-largest exporter of refugees.

Much of this was predictable. Modesty (and a certain wariness during this weird ownership hiatus at the Speccie) prevents me from simply reprinting my Telegraph column from 12 April last year in this space and taking a week off in the Bahamas. But, if you’ve got one of these new-fangled computer thingies, go to the Telegraph website and fish it out. At the time, the quagmire crowd, recovering from the non-Stalingrad-like fall of Baghdad, had moved on to a glittering new array of prêt-à-porter quagmires, a veritable quagjam of imminent catastrophe. You know the routine — a ‘massive humanitarian disaster’ (predicted by the head of the World Food Programme), a ‘slide into violent anarchy’, Kurdish secession, mass uprisings by the Arab street, etc, etc. I assured Telegraph readers none of these things would occur — the Kurds would settle for being Scotland or Quebec rather than Pakistan. And, indeed, when it came to draft the interim constitution, that’s just what happened: as with French in Canada, Kurdish will be an official language of the new Iraq.

But don’t worry. If you were opposed to war with Iraq, I long ago gave up hopes of changing anybody’s mind. If you’re one of the ‘BUSH LIED PEOPLE DIED’ crowd, I understand that the fact that very few people have died and that, indeed, there’s a significant net gain in lives for every day Saddam is out of power is less important than the menace the Bushitler poses to the world. But not every nay-sayer belongs to the freakshow Left, and the resistance to the Iraq war among what passes for the Right in Britain is far more distressing. If one can get past the snobbishness of Conservatives toward the swaggering Texan, the main objection seems to be to the radicalism of the Bush project. Some of this is a fear over ‘pre-emption’ — of a world in which the only hyperpower reserves unto itself the right to remove regimes that catch its eye for the wrong reason. There’s nothing terribly novel about this. As Pilger and the other armchair insurgents like to point out, 50 years ago London and Washington gave nary a thought to removing Mossadeq. No Security Council resolutions, no nothing. What happened between then and now was a legalistic fetishisation of state sovereignty that was less post-colonial than post-modern. No matter how dysfunctional and absurd a ‘state’ is, its sovereignty — i.e., the dictator’s sovereignty — is inviolable. That notion, in which the UN gentlemen’s club guarantees the security of every kook and oddball at the table, is much more radical than ‘pre-emption’.

Slightly less ridiculous is the argument that the Bush project — the seeding of genuine liberty in a region that’s never known it — is simply never going to work. That’s quite possible. But we know for certain that the old realpolitik approach to the Middle East doesn’t work: that’s what gave us September 11. The theory some of us have advanced for two and a half years now is that the region’s stability — the stability of a petrified septic tank — is the problem, and that any upturning of that stability would be hard put to make things worse.

But it isn’t a theory any longer. Instead of just rushing in and holding a national election, the Americans went in with a Tocquevillian plan to build representative government from the ground up. As Andrew Natsios of the US Agency for International Development says, ‘Local government is the schoolhouse of democracy.’ Iraq’s new town councils are up and running and covering 90 per cent of the population. When you’re building a state, that local foundation matters more than the federal government, the final brick in the pyramid. This is a complete inversion of the way the British did things when they invented Iraq: they started by importing a king from the Hashemites and worked down. But, given the way that turned out, the American method could hardly be less successful. (As readers know, I’m an old-school imperialist, but if I were the likes of Sir Max Hastings I’d think twice about trumpeting the superiority of John Bull’s approach to the fuzzy-wuzzy, given that most of the current hot spots — Iraq, the West Bank, Kashmir, the Afghan/Pakistan border — are the legacy of British imperial failure.)

What the nay-sayers also miss is the impact the Iraqi experiment is having on its neighbours. When I was motoring around Iraq last spring, I started from Amman, as my colleague Matthew Parris did last week. Unlike him, I wasn’t met at the airport by my chauffeur and I didn’t drive in a convoy of white SUVs — the most loathed vehicles in Iraq, incidentally, as you quickly pick up if you’re ever sitting in a café in a town square and one pulls up with UN or NGO markings. Anyway, riding back in my beat-up Nissan piece of junk I’d rented at the airport, I decided after roughing it in Iraq’s western desert to treat myself to an executive suite at the Grand Hyatt for a few days. The Jordanian bigwigs were very relieved that Saddam’s boot was no longer on the Hashemite windpipe. But, more than that, everybody I ran into — businessmen from the Emirates, Saudi sheikhs, candidates for that month’s Jordanian elections, Westernised Islamototty in the Amman boutiques, Arab ‘intellectuals’ (a fairly loose term) — was fascinated by what was going on in Iraq.

As much as these folks disliked Bush and America and Britain, they had priorities of their own — economic liberalisation, women’s rights, a non-tribal political culture, etc. — and they accepted that what had just happened in Iraq would have tremendous implications throughout the region. Some said this with regret; they were ashamed that it took Western occupation to provoke political liberalisation in the Arab world. A year on, far from ‘inflaming the Arab street’, there’s a broad acceptance of what happened throughout most of the Middle East. In Iraq itself, only 15 per cent of the population want the immediate withdrawal of coalition troops. But in Jordan and other Arab countries the most recent polls show that attitudes to America have perked up over the last year, albeit from an admittedly abysmal low. The good news is that Americans are now no more despised than the EU.

I wish more people in Britain and Europe could take pleasure in the achievements of the last year. Instead, they are obsessed with trivialities and invent strange new bogeymen like ‘neocons’, a category that barely exists except as a catch-all for any Bush adviser of robust views. The other day I was reading a column in the International Herald Tribune by Geoffrey Wheatcroft, no stranger to these pages, about Conrad Black’s cabal of ‘self-hating Canadians’ — Barbara Amiel, David Frum and yours truly. Why this should be a subject of interest to Herald Tribune readers, I’ve no idea. Perhaps it was a slow day. But in the course of his column Wheatcroft dropped a sentence that stopped me short: ‘Where the standard neoconservative line is aggressively optimistic — Israel is here to stay, and don’t forget it — Amiel is revealingly different.’

There are plenty of examples of ‘neocon’ aggressive optimism, the new Iraq being the obvious example. But I can’t quite believe that Wheatcroft intended to suggest that the continued existence of Israel is now merely a ‘neoconservative’ position. If so, it’s no wonder that Europeans regard Iraq as an insane adventure. For most Americans, the ‘Palestinian conflict’ is a peripheral problem, though, when you bring it to their attention, they incline towards the Israeli position. For Europeans, the Palestinians are the prism through which they view the entire region — and if you honestly believe that Sheikh Yassin was a ‘revered spiritual leader’ then it’s no wonder you find it hard to comprehend the advances in Iraq, where the ‘revered spiritual leader’ (Ayatollah Sistani) is of an entirely different order.

Meanwhile, the aggressive optimism seems justified. The dominoes have all begun teetering in the right direction. Even the most gung-ho Iranian theocrat doesn’t expect the mullahs to be running the joint in ten years’ time, or even five. In Syria, Boy Assad thought he could have fun destabilising the new Iraq. Instead, it’s destabilising him. For the first time in years, there are serious protests against what is now the sole surviving Baath party. Syrian Kurds, eyeing their brethren over the border, have been raising the Kurdish flag and toppling statues of young Bashar. The Syrians have announced what are so far mainly cosmetic changes, but the fact that they feel obliged even to fake some phoney reforms is the best indication of where things are heading. There will be movement in both Iran and Syria before the end of the year. As for Libya, let Matthew Parris believe the Gaddafi cave-in has nothing to do with Iraq: every man is entitled to find comfort where he can. But, for whatever reason, all these movements are in the direction laid out by Bush in his Whitehall speech in November.

As for Iraq needing UN ‘legitimacy’, why not ask the people? The UN to them means decadent bureaucrats like Hans von Sponeck, the former UN co-ordinator for Iraq who the other day expressed his preference for the ‘order’ Saddam brought to the country, or the stinking sewer of the oil-for-food programme, a humanitarian intervention that turned into a money-laundering scheme for Saddam’s Western cronies. If it’s a choice between aggressive neocon optimism or the UN’s slum-landlord approach to nation-building, I know which I’ll take. Look at it this way. Which would you bet on? Iraq and Afghanistan? Or Haiti and Kosovo?


TOPICS: Culture/Society; Editorial; Foreign Affairs; News/Current Events
KEYWORDS: goodnews; iraq; marksteyn; marksteynlist; oifanniversary; progress
Navigation: use the links below to view more comments.
first previous 1-2021-4041-6061-62 next last
To: prairiebreeze
hahaha ! Yeah, Bart sez it well ! ;^)

21 posted on 03/25/2004 11:31:47 AM PST by MeekOneGOP (The Democrats say they believe in CHOICE. I have chosen to vote STRAIGHT TICKET GOP for years !!)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 20 | View Replies]

To: Starve The Beast
AMEN!!!!!
22 posted on 03/25/2004 12:18:50 PM PST by Rutabega (the only good thing about living in Europe was finding out that we captured Saddam two hours early!)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 11 | View Replies]

To: Toirdhealbheach Beucail; Pokey78; shaggy eel; Byron_the_Aussie; Trapper John
<< I love this man! There are few that are his equal with the English tongue! >>

Few?

Any, perhaps?

Best ones -- B A

[Thanks for the Ping, Pokes]

bumpPING
23 posted on 03/25/2004 12:41:03 PM PST by Brian Allen ("He who dares not offend cannot be honest." - Thomas Paine)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 3 | View Replies]

To: Pokey78
Many Iraqis are voting with their feet. The UN High Commission for Refugees, which was expecting about two million new refugees to flee from the war last year, instead found no takers. All the traffic’s the other way, and the UN is now closing down its camps around Iraq’s borders owing to lack of business. The other day, the UN’s Ashrafi Camp in Iran, after 30 years as the largest Iraqi refugee facility, threw in the towel when the last refugee went home. Despite being advised by UNHCR that it was unsafe to do so, a million Iraqis are said to have gone back. Not bad for a country which in Saddam’s day was the fifth-largest exporter of refugees.

This is the biggest indicator about whether or not things are improving in Iraq over a year ago.

I am one American who wishes the Iraqis the very best as they embark on their 'experiment'!

24 posted on 03/25/2004 1:01:52 PM PST by TheDon (John Kerry, self proclaimed war criminal, Democratic Presidential nominee)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: Pokey78
Stellar Steyn. I especially love the metaphor in this sentence:

The theory some of us have advanced for two and a half years now is that the region’s stability — the stability of a petrified septic tank — is the problem, and that any upturning of that stability would be hard put to make things worse.

25 posted on 03/25/2004 2:06:39 PM PST by arasina (So there.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: Pokey78
"a veritable quagjam of imminent catastrophe"

LOL
26 posted on 03/25/2004 2:28:07 PM PST by Constantine XIII
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: Pokey78
Steyn for White House Press Secretary!
27 posted on 03/25/2004 2:38:34 PM PST by kevkrom (The John Kerry Songbook: www.imakrom.com/kerrysongs)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: Pokey78
Which would you bet on? Iraq and Afghanistan? Or Haiti and Kosovo?

That just about says it all.

28 posted on 03/25/2004 3:14:26 PM PST by McGavin999 (Evil thrives when good men do nothing!)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: Pokey78
Steyn, well Steyn, he's a master wordsmith...
29 posted on 03/25/2004 3:31:12 PM PST by gatorgriz ("The world is full of bastards - the number ever increasing the further one gets from Missoula, MT")
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: Toirdhealbheach Beucail
Toirdhealbheach

I bret it's pronounced something like "Tor-OOSH" huh? Them celts shore like their letters...

30 posted on 03/25/2004 3:45:39 PM PST by stands2reason ( During the cola wars, France was occupied by Pepsi for six months.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 3 | View Replies]

To: Toirdhealbheach Beucail
I think I found it -- Turlough?
31 posted on 03/25/2004 3:48:21 PM PST by stands2reason ( During the cola wars, France was occupied by Pepsi for six months.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 3 | View Replies]

To: WhiteGuy
When will it be determined that iraq can make it without a couple hundred billion of our money being poured in?

Not that long, the north is already booming.

I guess it's out of the question to expect them to pay US back.

Who knows? Europe didn't but Iraq may have more class.

Even the prissy-pants french sent us a really big statue for saving their bacon.

Excuse me? Just when did this happen?

32 posted on 03/25/2004 3:57:33 PM PST by Harmless Teddy Bear (Te audire non possum. Musa sapientum fixa est in aure)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 17 | View Replies]

To: Pokey78
Steyn knocks another one out of the park

Steyn proves again that he's the Michael Jordan of pundits

Steyn rocks!

Steyn bump

A year's worth of incision... just like last week's Steyn piece

Steyn does it again

Is Steyn's well bottomless?

It's getting tough to find new ways of praising Steyn's columns.

33 posted on 03/25/2004 4:19:54 PM PST by Yardstick
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: Pokey78
Sorry I'm late...just discovered how to find FR...(withdrawal has subsided.)
34 posted on 03/25/2004 5:05:42 PM PST by Right_in_Virginia
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 2 | View Replies]

To: Yardstick
If the Lefties had a writer half as talented as Steyn, we would be in trouble. Compare this to the inane ramblings of Dowd.
35 posted on 03/25/2004 5:53:53 PM PST by Democratshavenobrains
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 33 | View Replies]

To: Right_in_Virginia
Egad - I'm still shaking from FR withdrawal. Horrible! But you know what? The antidote is a Mark Steyn column!

Look at it this way. Which would you bet on? Iraq and Afghanistan? Or Haiti and Kosovo?

If the Iraqis do pull off a national government, it'll be raucous, disrespectful, noisy, infuriating, inconsistent, and a royal pain in the butt to deal with. Just like ours, and every other representative government on the face of the earth.

36 posted on 03/25/2004 6:13:40 PM PST by Billthedrill
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 34 | View Replies]

To: Pokey78
BTTT
37 posted on 03/25/2004 6:47:48 PM PST by Cultural Jihad
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: MeekOneGOP; Grampa Dave; BOBTHENAILER; Ragtime Cowgirl; onyx; potlatch; F14 Pilot; DoctorZIn; ...
Mark Steyn:

There will be movement in both Iran and Syria before the end of the year.

We would hope, the heads of Bashir and Khamenei from their shoulders.

Into a pair of jars by the door.

Available in reproduction from Neocon Canning.

Photo credit: Dead Men Sitting Club, Local 666, Middle Eastern Division

38 posted on 03/25/2004 7:03:30 PM PST by PhilDragoo (Hitlery: das Butch von Buchenvald)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 18 | View Replies]

To: PhilDragoo
"Dead Men Sitting Club, Local 666, Middle Eastern Division"

LoL

39 posted on 03/25/2004 7:08:04 PM PST by nuconvert ("America will never be intimidated by thugs and assassins." ( President Bush 3-20-04))
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 38 | View Replies]

To: Pokey78
Oh, thank you, thank you for the ping, and I'm soooooo grateful to get back on FR! I was getting the shakes pretty badly, LOL!
40 posted on 03/25/2004 7:42:06 PM PST by alwaysconservative (If it weren't for old, outdated ideas, Democrats would have no ideas at all.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 2 | View Replies]


Navigation: use the links below to view more comments.
first previous 1-2021-4041-6061-62 next last

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.

Free Republic
Browse · Search
News/Activism
Topics · Post Article

FreeRepublic, LLC, PO BOX 9771, FRESNO, CA 93794
FreeRepublic.com is powered by software copyright 2000-2008 John Robinson