Mark Steyn: One Year On, and Iraq's Better Off

The Chicago Sun-Times ^ | March 27, 2004 | Mark Steyn

[quidnunc]

Just under a year ago, Baghdad fell. A great day, or so you'd think — especially after the idiotic predictions of how the city would be a new Stalingrad, with coalition troops fighting street to street for months on end. But, instead of even a moment of sheepish embarrassment, all the experts — the U.N., the French, the world's media, the nongovernmental organizations and the left in general — simply galloped on to even more idiotic predictions of doom.

On April 12 last year, I wrote a column mocking the global naysayers' latest Top Ten Quagmires Of The Week. If it seems cruel to dredge them up out of the archive, I do so because, to listen to the current ballyhoo from Democrats, you'd think the administration's policy in this area has been a disaster. It hasn't. Indeed, for 2-1/2 years now, the naysayers to the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld-Rice approach to the war on terror have been close to 100 percent wrong on everything.

John Kerry, in his macho way, told Rolling Stone, apropos the Iraq war, that he never expected President Bush to f--- it up so much. In fact, Bush didn't asterisk it up at all. It's one of the least asterisked-up operations in history. The freak-show left prancing around on the anniversary demonstrations is one thing, but sensible people of all persuasions ought to be able to give the administration real credit for what they've done in Iraq these last 12 months.

Here are 10 predictions of doom from the conventional wisdom of a year ago, followed by some of my comments at the time, and a note on how things have turned out:

1. ''Iraq's Slide Into Violent Anarchy'' (The Guardian, April 11, 2003). Say what you like about Saddam, but he ran a tight ship and you didn't have to nail down the furniture.

I predicted: ''A year from now, Basra will have a lower crime rate than most London boroughs.''

One year on: Almost. According to the BBC, Basra is booming and its citizens are flush with new spending power. Despite Saddam Hussein's decision to empty the prisons of petty criminals on the eve of the war, in February British authorities reported that crime in the city has fallen by 70 percent.

-snip-

[xJones]

Great article. Thanks, quid.

[KC_Conspirator]

bump

[CHICAGOFARMER]

ditto ditto

[45Auto]

"The permanent floating crap game of the humanitarian lobby has a vastly inflated sense of its own importance and is prone to massive distortion in the cause of self-promotion"

Priceless.

[marktwain]

Bump for later

[solzhenitsyn]

Wonderful! Thank you for posting this column.

[AFPhys]

Ah... finally an article simple and clear enough to print off for my mom to counter the antiIraq concepts.

Thanks.

[pragmatic_asian]

And as anyone from the 'hood or David Chappelle can tell you, all craps games get robbed. Those UN humanitarian aid programs are the model of corruption.