Posted on 05/31/2006 3:07:17 PM PDT by naturalman1975
MAYBE this past week has taught us to pity. Because look: East Timor is being forgiven like Iraq never is.
Its capital can be looted, its soldiers can gun down its police, its gangs can murder children, its people can be made to live on charity, its politicians can squabble over the power they then abuse -- but no fool here says freedom was a mistake.
Even as our soldiers guard refugees cowering in church yards, still no commentator sneers that it all shows we were crazy to liberate East Timor in 1999.
No one is saying these 900,000 East Timorese just aren't cut out for democracy. Nor is anyone saying the toppled dictator -- Indonesia's old president Suharto in this case -- at least kept the killers under control.
No, East Timor is allowed to make mistakes without having its new freedom questioned the way it is so gleefully with Iraq.
It is forgiven as we forgive South Africa, despite everything, and even Zimbabwe. Think of how nice and understanding we've been of them.
Just consider: South Africa's economy is struggling so badly, 12 years after the end of apartheid, that private economists and the Congress of South African Trade Unions say more than 40 per cent of workers are out of a job. That's higher than the very worst estimate for Iraq.
What's more, some 20,000 South Africans are now murdered each year, according to police statistics, although Interpol has warned the true figure may be twice that -- or perhaps four times the number of Iraqis now killed each year in fighting. The incidence of rape and AIDS is more horrific than anything known in Iraq, too.
But we don't doubt South Africa is better free than enslaved, do we?
Or consider post-independence Zimbabwe: Its mad president, Robert Mugabe, has so wrecked the place that inflation is over 400 per cent and four in every five workers are unemployed.
He has now created such a famine in this rich land that millions of his people, hungrier than any Iraqis, must beg for food from foreign aid groups while their leader drives around in a new Mercedes S600L Pullman.
Yet, no one says we were wrong to help get rid of the white rulers of Harare. Or that it was stupid to free South Africa from apartheid. Or that East Timor should have stuck with Suharto, who at least kept these killers under control.
Of course not. With East Timor, South Africa and Zimbabwe -- and Russia, too -- we understand freedom isn't an overnight cure.
We know that even the British Parliament took centuries before banning slavery and giving women the vote. We know it was only a few decades ago that the United States finally gave all African-Americans their full rights.
We know democracy doesn't guarantee perfection -- just the right to sack the leaders who fall too short.
Only with Iraq, which under Saddam bled worse than South Africa did under apartheid, are we told freedom isn't worth the trouble.
THINK of former ambassador Rory Steele, one of 43 "eminent Australians" who signed a petition at the last election damning the Howard Government for freeing Iraq.
Snapped Steele: "The invaders did this in the name of democracy, a concept unaccepted to date in the Arab world and one that is totally unrealistic for Iraq."
Or think of Leftist lion Phillip Adams, the ABC guru, who said the hope of spreading democracy from Iraq to other Muslim nations was "lunatic" and a "load of ideological claptrap".
Some even dreamed of a sweeter Saddam. Bob Ellis, the author and speechwriter for Labor leaders, wrote: "I mean, I assume Saddam, a ruthless, ambitious fan of Stalin, did bad things and killed a lot of people in his time. But kill them pointlessly? I don't think so. He was too shrewd for that."
Or as Age writer Ken Davidson said in opposing a war to depose Saddam: he might be "a monster", but "arguably . . . Iraq can only be held together by a monster".
What might Iraqis think, to have their freedom so trashed by our Left?
Here's a clue: In January researchers from World Public Opinion asked 1220 Iraqis all over the country a blunt question: "Thinking about any hardships you might have suffered since the US/British invasion, do you personally think that ousting Saddam Hussein was worth it or not?
Answer: 77 per cent said yes, and only 22 per cent said no. Other polls have shown similar results, which isn't surprising if you know even a little of what Saddam once did, and what freedom now promises.
But how sick these times, that a former Russian dissident, the famed Natan Sharansky, now finds he must write a book with the title The Case for Democracy. Who suddenly needs such convincing?
I'll tell you. It's the ideologues who hate America so much that they'd rather defend a terrorist than back a democracy. It's the people whose paranoia of America is so great that its slightest slip is seen as a diabolical plot.
A SMALL example: as of yesterday, no one here had criticised our soldiers for not firing on the looters ransacking Dili's shops. We realise it is wise not to be so aggressive.
But when American soldiers did precisely the same in the first wild days of looting after the fall of Saddam, they were painted as barbarians perhaps worse than the dictator himself.
Raged Paul McGeough, the Fairfax journalist who won the 2004 Graham Perkin Award for Australian Journalist of the Year: "After witnessing three weeks of attacks on Baghdad and almost a week of looting -- especially of the Iraq National Museum -- questions about where the criminality lies become blurred."
Nothing is forgiven the Americans. Nothing, it often seems, is allowed to justify freedom for Iraq, the country they dared to liberate.
But with East Timor we are endlessly patient. We trust them with freedom, even though there is actually far less hope of it sticking there than there is in Iraq.
Still, the East Timorese aren't Muslims, are they? And their liberators weren't Americans. Big difference.
Excellent post!
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