Posted on 03/24/2003 10:33:01 AM PST by knighthawk
"SAFWAN, Iraq. Waving white flags and raising their hands to the sky, hundreds of Iraqi soldiers quickly surrendered to coalition forces in southern Iraq -- and some even tried to give themselves up to Western journalists. One Marine traffic control unit manning an intersection in southern Iraq accepted at least 45 soldiers' surrender by sundown Friday"
-- MSNBC, March 21.
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"American forces shot down at least two of the incoming [Iraqi] missiles"
-- Patrick E. Tyler, New York Times, March 21.
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"The militant Islamic groups Hamas and Islamic Jihad urged Iraqis on Friday to carry out suicide bombings against invading U.S. and British forces in Iraq. 'Iraqis should prepare explosive belts and would-be martyrs to combat the U.S. occupiers,' senior Hamas leader Abdel Aziz-al-Rantissi told Reuters in the Gaza Strip."
-- Nidal al-Mughrabi, Reuters, March 21.
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"As Tony Blair prepared to meet President Jacques Chirac at the European Union summit in Brussels last night, Downing Street drew attention to statistics that detail the value of EU sales to Saddam Hussein's regime. The figures show that since 1997, France and Germany have exported goods worth more than £1.7-billion to Iraq, compared to British exports worth £193-million. Government sources claimed France and Germany interpreted UN sanctions more liberally than Britain."
-- Benedict Brogan, Daily Telegraph, March 21.
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"Three polls taken over the weekend, when Tony Blair flew to the Azores summit, show a swing in favour of taking military action without explicit United Nations authorisation. YouGov, the internet polling company, found that 32% of respondents backed Britain joining U.S.-led action that did not have UN sanction. The figure is an increase of six points compared with the position a week earlier."
-- John Curtice, The Independent, March 19.
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"In Cairo, the biggest city in the Arab world with almost 17-million people, at least 5,000 angry protesters clashed with police using water cannon outside the historic al-Azhar mosque ... In Italy, about 200,000 farmers marched through Rome for peace, waving rainbow-colored flags and paralyzing traffic. 'I would like to cut out Bush's tongue -- It's a war for the rich and those who pay in the end are the poor people,' one woman told Reuters Television. In Germany more than 10,000 rallied. Activists blocked entrances to a U.S. military base in the southern city of Stuttgart as well as the American embassy in Berlin."
-- Reuters March 21.
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"[Jean] Chrétien also said that forcing a regime change is not desirable. Many leaders in the world are not his friends, but, he adds, only the local people have the right to change government. 'If we change every government we don't like in the world where do we start? Who is next?' "
-- CBC News Online, March 18.
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Who is next indeed? Judging from the mail I get, there are thousands of Canadians who hope that it might be Chrétien.
The American campaign in Iraq is barely 60 hours old, but already it is inflicting terrible casualties upon the deceptions and delusions of the pre-war period.
The people of Iraq themselves are showing that the "local people" there desperately wanted their government to be changed -- but lacked the strength to do the job. Soldiers are surrendering in droves. Civilians are welcoming their liberators. And the relatively small numbers of protesters in Cairo compared to the vast angry crowds in Rome suggests that Saddam Hussein's real constituency is not to be found in the "Arab street," but among the anti-American leftists (and far-rightists) of Europe.
Even in Europe, though, that constituency's strength is ultimately limited. We heard so much gloating about how this war would wreck Tony Blair's government. Instead, he triumphed last week in another important vote in the House of Commons -- and his courage and commitment are paying off in rapidly rising public support for his policies.
Meanwhile, the leaders of Hamas are giving the lie to the claim that the "secular" Saddam Hussein and the "religious" extremists of the jihad movements are opposed to each other. And the shocking discrepancy between the 5,000 protesters in Cairo and the 200,000 protesters in Rome casts interesting light on who really supports Saddam -- not so much the supposedly ferocious "Arab Street" but the smugly anti-American "European Suburb."
What else? American anti-missile missiles -- so often damned by the anti-military press as a waste of money -- are blasting Iraq's terror weapons out of the air. At the same time, the British government's financial reporting is blasting apart the pretense that "containment is working." In fact, for half a decade, the French and German governments have been subverting the containment policy by violating and defying the UN's sanctions.
War is a grim thing. But it is sometimes a necessary thing -- and very often a clarifying thing. We have learned much in the opening hours of this war. We will learn more in the days ahead. When the Iraqi archives fall into Allied hands, we will learn about the complex structure of international terrorism over the past three decades. We may learn something too about the flow of money from Iraq into France and Germany -- not only to French and German corporations, but very possibly to individuals, including senior political figures.
We will learn the full horror of what went on inside Iraq. The perfunctory condemnations of Saddam we hear from so many opponents of the war will suddenly look utterly inadequate in comparison to the nightmare cruelty of Saddam's regime. Perhaps -- is this too much to hope for? -- the Arab intellectuals who kept silent about Saddam's cruelty will be shamed out of nationalist pride into moral awakening; a moral awakening that will at last discredit terrorism and open the way to peace with Israel.
Finally, we will all learn something about ourselves and our political leaders. The months since 9/11 have been a moral test. The Bush administration has passed with flying colours. Its opponents have failed. Politics can be a long, slow business. But in the end, moral failure will be held to account -- even in Canada.
DFrum@aei.org
I think this story must be told, but there is no guarantee that it will be. Particularly in the middle east as well as around the world.
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