Mark Steyn MEGA PING!!
Posted on 08/12/2002 11:53:45 PM PDT by JohnHuang2
War with Iraq looms and not everyone is happy about it. "I think the principle of 'first things first' does apply," says Al Gore, "and has to be followed if we are to have any chance of success." By this he means that, instead of Saddam's removal, Afghanistan's stability "needs to be assured first" -- just as in the Second World War we wisely concentrated on nation-building in the Solomon Islands for two or three years instead of rushing on to liberate a lot of other places. I'd say it's Al Gore's stability that needs to be assured first.
Across the Atlantic, those two old pantomime dames, Ted Heath (Britain's worst post-war Prime Minister) and Denis Healey (Britain's worst post-war Chancellor of the Exchequer), are pursing their lips and hoisting their bosoms, not for the first time. Wisely, Lord Healey is not being quite as specific in his predictions of doom as he was in 1991, when he confidently announced that war with Saddam would "push up the price of oil to $65 a barrel for about a year, produce a collapse in the American banking system ... and produce a world recession." Meanwhile, the Continentals are all hot for Unmovic. I assumed Unmovic was the new and even more obstinate Serb strongman, but apparently it's the latest inspections regime -- the UN Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission -- that Saddam's suddenly all eager to invite in.
What dictator wouldn't be tickled by being "monitored"? Saddam's eternal participation in an ongoing field study of dictatorship is the reductio ad absurdum of "stability" fetishization. It was the stability junkies who prevailed on Bush Sr. to leave the Saddamites in power 11 years ago. Just about every 10 minutes somewhere on your radio or TV dial these days you can hear bigshot Democrat Senator Joe Biden retailing for the umpteenth time a pompous little anecdote in which he explains how he's warned Bush against taking out Saddam. "Mr. President," he claims to have said, "there is a reason your father stopped and did not go to Baghdad. The reason he stopped is he didn't want to stay for five years."
And your point is ... ? By my arithmetic, that means we'd have been out in spring 1996. Sounds a good deal to me. Instead, it's late summer 2002 and Britain and America are still ineffectually bombing Iraq every week while somehow managing to get blamed for systematically starving to death a million Iraqi kids -- or two million or whatever it's up to by now -- through UN sanctions, though funnily enough UN sanctions don't seem to have so tightened Saddam's purse strings that he can't find 25,000 bucks to give to the family of each Palestinian suicide bomber. More than that, he's still here. And, simply by being still here, he's what passes for a success story in the Arab world. Today, French flights are once again landing at Saddam Hussein International Airport in Baghdad. With every week he survives, the will to take him out diminishes. With every month, the will even to constrain him does, too. And, with every year, his legend throughout the region increases.
So Saddam has to go. He will fall quickly, as quickly as the "mighty Afghan warrior, humbler of empires" fell. The regime that replaces him will be an improvement and, more importantly, will set in motion a chain of events, state by state. Just to run through a few:
SAUDI ARABIA
As I wrote last week, a new regime in Baghdad means more oil, which means cheaper prices at the pump, which means more pressure on the House of Saud, whose underpants get tightened a notch with every per barrel dollar drop. Thus, Saddam's removal could be seriously crushing. Even without total internal collapse, the less money they're getting from oil the less they have to fund Islamist recruitment in Europe, South Asia and North America, and the more internal dissension there is in the kingdom the more likely their excitable young men are to wage the jihad at home rather than abroad. Leaving Saddam as the regional muscle man means allowing the Saudis to continue providing the ideological heft to Islamist terrorism.
JORDAN
There are rumours doing the rounds in London and Washington that King Abdullah has been more or less bought by Saddam, and pretty cheaply, too. This is in the grand tradition of King Hussein's decision to stick with his Iraqi "brother" during the last Gulf War, when even the Syrians signed up with the Americans. It's obvious that the longer Saddam stays in power the more Jordan will be corrupted, and eventually we'll wind up with one more Arab sewer state. The Hashemite Kingdom is already an important route for Iraqi sanctions-busting, and Saddam would quite like to use it as a military highway to the West Bank, too.
I'm not a Hashemite romantic: When you actually sit down and try and work out why Jordan gets such a good press, it seems to boil down mainly to the Royal Family's taste in hot-looking westernized babes. But, if their good points remain kinda mysterious, it's nevertheless the case that they've got fewer bad points than any of their neighbours. Getting Saddam off the Hashemite windpipe will be the first step in letting the most reformable Arab regime start reforming. Leaving Saddam in power means losing Jordan.
IRAN
This week, the original Islamist nutters have been firing on their hapless citizens in Teheran, Esfahan, Ghazvin and other Iranian cities. Protesters report that the regime's riot police are speaking Arabic, confirming rumours that the mullahs have hired Saudis, Iraqis and others to do the heavy work of shooting civilians. The likelihood that a young pro-western population will be cowed by Arab outsiders decreases significantly after Saddam's gone: The liberation of Iraq will hasten the revolution in Iran.
THE PALESTINIAN AUTHORITY
The Palestinian people are perhaps the best testament to the defects of stability. They've been kept in an artificially stable environment for half a century: the faux "refugee camps" of Jenin and the like, which are effectively UN-supervised terrorist training facilities now populated by three generations of "refugees" who've never lived in the places they're supposed to be refugees from. All- out war to the death would be preferable, regardless of who won. Either the Arabs would get their way and push the Jews into the sea or the Arabs would be decisively beaten once and for all. But neither scenario would have led to the remorseless descent into depravity that the Palestinians have accomplished in their UN- mandated limbo. The death-cult psychosis doesn't exist in isolation: it's armed by Iran, bankrolled by Iraq, and philosophically sustained by Saudi Islamism. It will not survive the liquidation of its state patrons. This is good news for any Palestinians interested in actual life.
None of the above will happen without a massive humiliating military defeat of the Arab world's Number One loonitoon. Shortly thereafter, the Ayatollahs and ol' man Yasser will be gone, and the House of Saud, Junior Assad and Mubarak will follow. Think I'm crazy? Look at the map the last time the West went to war with Saddam. In 1991, Afghanistan was still Communist, as were the Central Asian republics, and Pakistan was under the corrupt Sharif regime. Eleven years later, General Musharraf is trying his hardest to be Washington's new best friend, and American forces are in Afghanistan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and even Georgia. The Middle East's eastern and northern borders have quietly become an American sphere of influence. The regimes on the ground are of varying degrees of unattractiveness, but none of 'em is causing the West any trouble. That's the way Araby will look in a couple of years. It starts in Baghdad, and soon.
None of the above will happen without a massive humiliating military defeat of the Arab world's Number One loonitoon. Shortly thereafter, the Ayatollahs and ol' man Yasser will be gone, and the House of Saud, Junior Assad and Mubarak will follow. Think I'm crazy? Look at the map the last time the West went to war with Saddam. In 1991, Afghanistan was still Communist, as were the Central Asian republics, and Pakistan was under the corrupt Sharif regime. Eleven years later, General Musharraf is trying his hardest to be Washington's new best friend, and American forces are in Afghanistan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and even Georgia. The Middle East's eastern and northern borders have quietly become an American sphere of influence. The regimes on the ground are of varying degrees of unattractiveness, but none of 'em is causing the West any trouble. That's the way Araby will look in a couple of years. It starts in Baghdad, and soon.
I just hope that before they take out the #1 Islamaikazi Loonitoon, they spend a couple of days killing and eliminating the ancient Mullahs/Ayatollahs in Iran and all of their war toys and Junior Assad and his band of thugs in Syria. Then we can get free air bases from these newly liberated countries to really eliminate the #1 Loonitoon in Baghdad.
Then let the Israelis silence forever the mass killer Arafatty. After they kill Arafatty, they can put a bounty on the head of every Jihad is Crap Islamakazi in their area. $50,000 per head should take care of the terror problem in a few days. The average Palestinian want peace and would work hard for a $50,000 bonus.
Next, we can give the house of Saud 48 hours to kill ever al Qaeda thug/terrorist and those who financed the al Qaeda thugs. If they don't respond let the Turks take back their sands with oil. Options will remain open with Lybia and Egypt. If their leaders want to commit suicide, fine. Other wise they clean out and behead their al Qaeda thugs and backers.
In the meantime we take over every numbered account the Opecker Princes have in the foreign banks to pay for our war costs, 9/11 and donate what's left to the innocent Arabs who have suffered at the hands of these despots for over 20 years.
The great day to start this better new world will be at 12:01 am Baghdad time on 9/11/2001. Then, all day on tv, we would have vivid reminders of our 9/11, while on a split tv screen, we could see our bombers delivering the payback for our 9/11 to the Islamakazis who started this terrorism. We could see 100's of cruise missiles launched from ships and subs around and intop Iraq, Iran and Syria and then see them hit their Islamakazi targets.
Let their capitals and key cities burn for days like our Trade Center Buildings and our pentagon did. Each day broadcast to the nations of Islamic terrorism the pictures of their capitals and key cities burning with the following in Arabic:
You are either with us or against us! Chose life or death! The choice is yours. We have have made our decision, and you have just seen the beginning of it. It will get worse if you resist!
It is also the one plan for the push to Baghdad that has NOT been leaked to the New York Times. Therefore, that's the one that I expect.
Congressman Billybob
Click for latest column: "Good People, Naked People, People Who Are Wet and Wild."
What then? Exactly who will "own" the oil? Who is going to come around and give us 50 cent per gallon gas? If our government is in charge, the price will double and the quality will suck. Will it be a FOB oil company? What would Unocal have to do to get that deal?
I don't think this is quite as simple as it might seam to some/
"Stability junkies" live by a myth.
The Saudi House of Cards will fail and no other military power will intervene to keep the U.S. from fixing the problems.
And as for "ownership" of the oil the first phase would be "control" of the oil. To the victor ...
Interesting.
Mark Steyn insight-spreading bump.
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