Mark Steyn: Quagmire Watch!

My column on Iraq one year on prompted a lot of skeptical commentary in the wake of the last week's news. Peter Caress in Bethesda summed up most of the main points:

Okay, here goes. Any discomfort up your ass is due to excessive viewing of CNN, ABC, CBS, NBC, etc, and a shaft of Steyn sunshine is precisely what it needs. My point in that column and my original Daily Telegraph column a year ago was a very simple one. Maybe you should stick it on the refrigerator. Here it comes:

When the media say something large and terrible is happening, it means something small and bad is happening.

When the media say something catastrophic is happening, it means (drumroll please)

Oh, sure. Sometimes two, four, 17 people are up to some dirty business, but the cataclysm the media says portends never occurs. This situation has prevailed now for two and a half years and you really ought to be used to it. To re-cap:

THE BRUTAL AFGHAN WINTER! = Daytime temperatures 40 degrees higher than New Hampshire.

THE MIGHTY PASHTUN WARRIOR, HUMBLER OF EMPIRES! = El floppo loser face down in a daisycutter crater.

THE MIGHTY SANDSTORM THAT’S STALLED THE AMERICAN ADVANCE IN THE QUAGMIRE OF MESOPOTAMIA! = A short rest stop in the fastest heavy-armor advance in military history.

“THERE ARE NO AMERICANS AT THE AIRPORT” (Robert Fisk, Andrew Gilligan, etc) = Rumsfeld’s cutting the ribbon at the Terminal B Starbucks.

OMG, this could be the best Steyn ever...and that's saying something.

QUAGMIRE WATCH!

My column on Iraq one year on prompted a lot of skeptical commentary in the wake of the last week's news. Peter Caress in Bethesda summed up most of the main points:

Given the current state of affairs in Iraq -- the massacre in Fallujah, the Sadrist uprising -- I wonder if you need to rethink your column "One year on, and Iraq's better off."

Especially point (3): "The suicide-bomber depravity is getting more depraved even as it gets more impotent. But there remains no widespread popular 'resistance' except in the minds of the left's armchair insurgents." A lot more Shi'ites that before now resent the occupation, and we've now had the heaviest fighting since the initial invasion.

Or point (1): "I predicted: 'A year from now, Basra will have a lower crime rate than most London boroughs.'" Sadr's followers have occupied the governor's office in Basra.

Or point (5): "One year on: [Repect for Iraq's inherent confederalism] seems to be happening. The coalition transition and the new constitution both respect the realities on the ground." The Kurds may be happy with the interim constitution, but the Shi'ites and Sunnis are not. Sistani considers the constitution illegitimate.

Or point (10): "I predicted: 'In a year's time, Iraq will be, at a bare minimum, the least badly governed state in the Arab world.'" Sadr just launched an uprising. Fallujah is scarcely governed at all. In the rest of the country people are arming for the civil war they believe to be inevitable. Clerics and professionals are getting assassinated, sometimes for political reasons, sometimes for grudges. Does this sound like a well-governed country to you?

I don't think Iraq is a disaster, but I recognize that last week it was a mess, and with the Sadrist uprising I have to downgrade Iraq to being a huge mess. We'll probably get through the present crisis somehow, but in the meanwhile you shouldn't claim that most of your predictions were proven almost completely correct. Don't blow sunshine up our asses.

Sincerely yours,

Peter Caress
Bethesda, Maryland

Okay, here goes. Any discomfort up your ass is due to excessive viewing of CNN, ABC, CBS, NBC, etc, and a shaft of Steyn sunshine is precisely what it needs. My point in that column and my original Daily Telegraph column a year ago was a very simple one. Maybe you should stick it on the refrigerator. Here it comes:

When the media say something large and terrible is happening, it means something small and bad is happening.

When the media say something catastrophic is happening, it means (drumroll please)

…IT ISN’T!!!

Oh, sure. Sometimes two, four, 17 people are up to some dirty business, but the cataclysm the media says portends never occurs. This situation has prevailed now for two and a half years and you really ought to be used to it. To re-cap:

THE BRUTAL AFGHAN WINTER! = Daytime temperatures 40 degrees higher than New Hampshire.

THE MIGHTY PASHTUN WARRIOR, HUMBLER OF EMPIRES! = El floppo loser face down in a daisycutter crater.

THE SEETHING ARAB STREET! = Westchester county cul-de-sac.

THE JENIN MASSACRE! = The brutal Afghan winter.

THE MIGHTY SANDSTORM THAT’S STALLED THE AMERICAN ADVANCE IN THE QUAGMIRE OF MESOPOTAMIA! = A short rest stop in the fastest heavy-armor advance in military history.

BAGHDAD IS THE NEW STALINGRAD! = Baghdad is the new Kabul.

THE WORST CULTURAL DESCRATION IN HISTORY! = Thirty missing potshards.

“THERE ARE NO AMERICANS AT THE AIRPORT” (Robert Fisk, Andrew Gilligan, etc) = Rumsfeld’s cutting the ribbon at the Terminal B Starbucks.

The storyline has now evolved. Fallujah is the new Stalingrad, and Sadr's militia are the new mighty Pashtun warriors. So let’s consider this week’s quagmire and see whether or not it negates the points I made:

Point 3): "The suicide-bomber depravity is getting more depraved even as it gets more impotent. But there remains no widespread popular 'resistance' except in the minds of the left's armchair insurgents."

Mr Caress says:

A lot more Shi'ites that before now resent the occupation, and we've now had the heaviest fighting since the initial invasion.

I say: The “heaviest fighting” is a relative term. 99.99% of Iraqi Shi’ites aren’t involved in the troubles of the last week. This guy Sadr is a junior-league blowhard whom the media have decided is the new Khomeini. As one of his commanders told them, “If they come for our leader, they will ignite all of Iraq.” No, they won’t. For purposes of comparison, Gordon Simpson of Tauranga, New Zealand points out the following:

At 5.30am on 12 October 1917 at Passchendaele, in Flanders, men of the New Zealand Division went "over the bags". One thousand of them were dead before breakfast. (On a proportionate basis today, that's the equivilant of 300,000 American GIs and Marines
perishing - in two and a half hours). The headlines in the NZ papers the next day read: Heavy Casualties at the Front.

Passchendaele was a quagmire. Iraq is standard colonial policing.

Next time there’s a G7 or World Bank meeting in your neighborhood, stroll along and watch the riot. I was at the Summit of the Americas in Quebec City a year or two back. It looked like Armageddon on TV – billowing smoke, water cannon, concrete blocks raining from the skies. Thirty yards away, I was having a café au lait in the sunshine with old friends and colleagues, including Francie Ducros, the Canadian official subsequently famed for calling Bush a “moron”, who, aside from having to wipe the faint whiff of tear gas from her eyes every four or five minutes, was having a very good time.

Point 1): "I predicted: 'A year from now, Basra will have a lower crime rate than most London boroughs.'"

Mr Caress says:

Sadr's followers have occupied the governor's office in Basra.

I say: Big deal. The British authorities took the decision to police Basra in their traditional, hands-off colonial style, and the Americans to the north eventually decided to do likewise. You can disagree with that decision, but that’s the policy. That means that when some jerks take over a cop shop the coalition doesn’t bomb ‘em out, reducing the neighborhood to rubble and filling the streets with corpses. This isn’t Waco and Paul Bremer isn’t Janet Reno. Sadr’s goons were quickly evicted from the police stations in Sadr City and as The Washington Post reported:

As a fighting force, Sadr's militia impressed neither U.S. commanders nor the Iraqi officers at one police station they occupied for three hours.

"Mahdi Army! They're not an army!" Officer Haider Raheem said of the unemployed young men who took over one station by brandishing grenades. "They're a bunch of looters." Before running off at the sound of approaching tanks, Raheem said, they scooped up everything from rifles to food for the prisoners. "Can you believe they even stole the water cup from the restroom?" he said.

They occupied the police station for three whole hours! Wow! That’s impressive. Not by the standards of US suburban bank sieges, but evidently by the standards of Sadr City.

Point 5): "One year on: [Repect for Iraq's inherent confederalism] seems to be happening. The coalition transition and the new constitution both respect the realities on the ground."

Mr Caress says:

The Kurds may be happy with the interim constitution, but the Shi'ites and Sunnis are not. Sistani considers the constitution illegitimate.

I say: Sadr is a bigger threat to Sistani than to the Americans. The Shia leadership are quiet-lifers and they're sitting this one out.

Point 10): "I predicted: 'In a year's time, Iraq will be, at a bare minimum, the least badly governed state in the Arab world.'"

You say:

Sadr just launched an uprising. Fallujah is scarcely governed at all. In the rest of the country people are arming for the civil war they believe to be inevitable. Clerics and professionals are getting assassinated, sometimes for political reasons, sometimes for grudges. Does this sound like a well-governed country to you?

I say: Yes. Fewer people are being killed in Iraq right now than in Syria, Iran or Saudi Arabia. The only difference is the western media are in Iraq and not in any of those other dumps, and, as I’ve pointed out before, they’re still using their old Baath Party translators. As to Fallujah being “scarcely governed at all”, yes, it’s a fetid dump and I had a lousy lunch there last year, as the only westerner in a restaurant full of surly Arab men who no doubt would have liked to kill me but didn’t quite dare. But 300,000 people live in the city. In all the pictures of the lynchings, can you add up more than a hundred? And half of them are punk kids under 11. Four brave men died in vile circumstances. A few score are depraved enough to cheer on their killers. 299,900 of the town’s population were either disapproving or indifferent. And in the Arab world indifference will do.

STEYN ONLINE April 6th 2004

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