Posted on 11/19/2007 1:15:16 PM PST by Ernest_at_the_Beach
A few weeks ago, in Britain's Prospect magazine, the paper's foreign editor, Bartle Bull, published a bold essay saying that the high tide of violence in Iraq was essentially behind us and that the ebb had disclosed some interesting things. First, the Iraqi people as a whole had looked into the abyss of civil war and had drawn back from the brink. Second, the majority of Sunni Arabs had realized that their involvement with al-Qaida forces was not a patriotic "insurgency" but was instead a horrific mistake and had exposed their society to the most sadistic and degraded element in the entire Muslim world. Third, the Shiite militias had also come to appreciate that they had overplayed their hand. There remained, according to Bull, an appalling level of criminal and antisocial violence, but essentially Iraq was agreed on a rough new dispensation whereby ethnic and social compromise would determine events and where subversive outside interference would not be welcomed.
I read the article and admired its nerve, but I didn't really choose to believe it. It didn't appear to me that things had yet bottomed out, and it didn't seem believable that the essential sectarianism of the Maliki regime, illustrated so graphically by its crude execution of Saddam Hussein, could be explained away. Worst of all, the exodus of so many secular or qualified or educated Iraqis (perhaps as many as 2.5 million exiles living in Syria or Jordan or farther away) seemed to threaten a long period of social and cultural decline, a sort of Road Warrior situation in which only the parties of God would benefit.
Keeping all this in mind, it nonetheless does begin to look as if Iraqis may in fact have started to recover command over their own destiny,
(Excerpt) Read more at slate.com ...
Any minute now ... I’m waiting for the Dems to claim that ..
Oh yes Iraq is turning around but only because we threatened to remove the troops... Of course we never meant a word of it.. The troop withdraw threats were only done to entice the Iraqis to step up which oh golly Gee they have done..
Every Republican should be out in force screaming that if the Democrats had their way there would be NO troops in Iraq today and the country would have fallen to sectarian and Al-Qaida forces....
Period end of story.. Democrats continue to be on the wrong side of history.
Great article...thanks for the pig
Even though Hitch is a drunken communist, he has always been fair when it comes to the war on terror, and he has pegged the demonRATs to a tee.
They have a long record....even back to the Civil War...
From this :
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Democrats nominated McClellan and a platform which called for a truce and settlement with the South
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FR Thread:
Agreed.
I would question their patriotism, if I thought they had any.
ping
He nailed the democrats in this article.
Hitchens may not be a Christian but with this evidence, I take him on his word that he is not anti-Christian. It seems the majority of the British and Europeans are inflicted with Christianophobia, blinding their reasoning on most things political.
Very well said.
Great information...thanks for adding fuel to the fire!!!
Since Mr. Hitchens is a self-proclaimed anti-theist, to whom would he give thanks if he were to do so?
Hitchens is godless by his own admission.......who does he give thanks to ?
The precedence is the fall of the Berlin Wall & collapse of the Soviet Union. People of the same ilk as today's Iraq war opponents attacked Reagan relentlessly for his bold aggression against the Soviets. When the wall came down, they just claimed that it was going to happen anyhow. They say the same thing today.
thanks, bfl
bump
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