Right Side of History: Which Side Are You On?

I found three references to the following commentary by Mark Steyn in excellent blogs that I highly recommend if you grow weary of my brand of strident ranting:
Right Intentions, The Owner's Manual and Chrenkoff

Steyn's commentary is so excellent, readers will likely not be satisfied with the excerpts I post, so I hope you will read the entire article: The Right Side of History

The other day in the Guardian Martin Kettle wrote: ‘The war was a reckless, provocative, dangerous, lawless piece of unilateral arrogance. But it has nevertheless brought forth a desirable outcome which would not have been achieved at all, or so quickly, by the means that the critics advocated, right though they were in most respects.’

Very big of you, pal. And I guess that’s as close to a mea culpa as we’re going to get: even though Bush got everything wrong, it turned out right. Funny how that happens, isn’t it? In a few years’ time, they’ll have it down pat — just like they have with Eastern Europe. Oh, the Soviet bloc [the Middle East thugocracies] was bound to collapse anyway. Nothing to do with that simpleton Ronnie Raygun [Chimpy Bushitler]. In fact, all Raygun [Chimpy] did was delay the inevitable with his ridiculous arms build-up [illegal unprovoked Halliburton oil-grab], as many of us argued at the time: see my 1984 column ‘Yuri Andropov, The Young, Smart, Sexy New Face Of Soviet Communism’ [see the April 2004 Spectator column ‘Things Were Better Under Saddam: The coalition has destroyed Baathism, says Rod Liddle, and with it all hopes of the emergence of secular democracy’ — and yes, that really ran in these pages, on 17 April, not 1 April.]

By the way, when’s the next Not In Our Name rally? How about this Saturday? Millions of Nionists can flood into Trafalgar Square to proclaim to folks in Iraq and Lebanon and Egypt and Jordan and Saudi Arabia and the Palestinian Authority that all the changes under way in the region are most certainly Not In Their Name.
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As for me, I got a lot of things wrong these last three years, but, looking at events in the Middle East this last week, I’m glad that, unlike the Nionist Entity, I got the big stuff right. On 8 May 2003, a couple of weeks after the fall of Saddam, I wrote in the Speccie’s then sister paper the Jerusalem Post:

‘You don’t invade Iraq in order to invade everywhere else, you invade Iraq so you don’t have to invade everywhere else.’

And so it’s turned out.

Some of the reasons for starting the remaking of the Middle East in Iraq were obvious within a day or two of 11 September. As I said back then, by his sheer survival, Saddam Hussein had become a symbol of America’s lack of will. As long as he was around, the message to Gaddafi, Arafat, Assad, Mubarak, the House of Saud and the rest of the gang was that we were still in a 10 September world.
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When the West’s headless chickens were running around squawking that there were more than a hundred parties on the ballot, it was all going to be one almighty mess, they failed to understand that the design flaw of Iraq is paradoxically its greatest strength: the traditional Arab solution — the local strongman — was not available. Instead, in the run-up to the election and in the month since, we’ve seen various groupings come together, hammer out areas of agreement, reach out to other coalitions, identify compromise positions, etc. — in a word, politics. The sight of eight million Iraqis going to the polls was profoundly moving to their neighbours in Syria, Lebanon, Egypt etc. But it was all the pluralist multi-party smoke-filled-room stuff that caught the fancy of the frustrated political class in those other countries.
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Islamism, with its plans to destroy America, take back Europe, colonise Australia and set you up with 72 virgins, may be bonkers but it’s a big idea. And you can’t beat it with a small, shrivelled idea like another decade or three of Mubarak or Assad or some such. The Bush administration decided that the only big idea they had to sell was liberty. The Europeans and the Europhile US media mostly scoffed. They’d been here before. Back in the Cold War, the Americans were able to use the phrase ‘the free world’ without irony; the French, Germans and even the British never were. This time round, the media assured us that what Iraqis wanted was not freedom but ‘security’. They didn’t all go as far as Rod Liddle, pining for the smack of firm Saddamite government, but they subscribed to the same general thesis: freedom is some airy-fairy illusion; in Saddam’s day, the streets were safe and there was no crime, apart from the ones he was committing. All wrong, as wrong as the ‘brutal Afghan winter’ and all the other media fictions. On 30 January, Bush’s big idea squared off against the head-hackers’ big idea — you vote, you die — and we know which one the Iraqi people chose, and which the rest of the region, to one degree or another, is following.
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With hindsight, the fellow travellers were let off far too easily when the Iron Curtain fell like a discarded burka. Little more than a decade later, they barely hesitated a moment before jumping in on the wrong side of history yet again — and this time without the excuse that the ideological virtues of communism had merely gone awry in practice. It’s hard to make that argument about Islamism or Baathism, though Rod Liddle gamely gave the latter a whirl. But personally I hope if ever I find myself one of the unfortunate subjects of a totalitarian dictatorship, that it’s Bush and the Republicans who take up my cause rather than the Left.