Unfreezing the Middle East -- Bush as "Midwife"

Mark Steyn has a nice piece on both the grandness of Bush's Middle East adventure and the perversity of the "Defeatocrats" opposition.

An excerpt:

These sad hollow men [the Democrats] may yet get their way -- which is to say they may succeed in persuading the American people that a remarkable victory in the Middle East is in fact a humiliating defeat. It would be an incredible achievement. Peter Worthington, the Canadian columnist and veteran of World War II and Korea, likes to say that there's no such thing as an unpopular won war. The Democrat-media alliance are determined to make Iraq an exception to that rule. In a week's time, Iraqis will participate in the most open political contest in the history of the Middle East. They're building the freest society in the region, and the only truly federal system. In three-quarters of the country, life has never been better. There's an economic boom in the Shia south and a tourist boom in the Kurdish north, and, while the only thing going boom in the Sunni Triangle are the suicide bombers, there were fewer of those in November than in the previous seven months.

Meanwhile, Iraq's experiment in Arab liberty has had ripple effects beyond its borders, pushing the Syrians most of the way out of Lebanon, and in Syria itself significantly weakening Baby Assad's regime. Saad Eddin Ibrahim, who's spent years as a beleaguered democracy advocate in Egypt, told the Washington Post's Jim Hoagland the other day that, although he'd opposed the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq, he had to admit it had "unfrozen the Middle East, just as Napoleon's 1798 expedition did. Elections in Iraq force the theocrats and autocrats to put democracy on the agenda, even if only to fight against us. Look, neither Napoleon nor President Bush could impregnate the region with political change. But they were able to be the midwives."

As with all Steyn's stuff, it's well worth reading [here].

Over at The Free West, Leon deWinter, citing the same article, notes the absurdity of liberals rooting for Islamo-fascists. He writes:

[T]he Democrats and the liberal MainStreamMedia want a defeat in Iraq in order to hurt Bush and the Republicans.

It is a mind-blowing phenomenon taking place in the media in the US and the EU, and each one of us not blinded by ideological hatred can see this amazing sight: liberals rooting for an American defeat at the hands of Islamo-fascists.

Why do they prefer chaos, suffering and tyranny in Iraq?

The answer is shockingly simple: they hate Bush more than they love liberty in the Middle East....

This is the sad conclusion after reading hundreds of articles in the New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Los Angeles Times, Newsweek, The Nation, seeing hundreds of items on CNN and the main broadcasters in the US and in Holland and Germany, following the main media in Germany and the UK.

What we witness today, is the total breakdown of liberal decency.

Read the whole thing here.

And over at the New York Post, Ralph Peters notes another aspect of the, probably terminal, corruption of liberalism.

Today's Joe McCarthys aren't on Capitol Hill — they're in the newsroom. In lieu of Edward R. Murrow, we have Hedda Hopper masquerading as Joan of Arc.

Read the whole thing here.

All of these are facets of a remarkable reversal that has taken place in American politics over the past few decades. Liberals have become everything they once hated. They are elitist, exclusionary, racist, isolationist, cynical, ruthlessly, almost anarchistically, destructive of both individuals and institutions, more than a bit careless with the truth, and relentlessly amoral. Steyn is right. There is no more decent left in America and Europe. It is George W. Bush who today carries high the standard of decency in a problematic world. More power to him!

RELATED:

One of my Louisiana correspondents recommends this article on the contemptible "Cowardice" of the European left and the devastating consequences that have flowed from it [thanks, Jim].

A few days ago Henry Broder wrote in Welt am Sonntag, "Europe — your family name is appeasement." It's a phrase you can't get out of your head because it's so terribly true.

Appeasement cost millions of Jews and non-Jews their lives as England and France, allies at the time, negotiated and hesitated too long before they noticed that Hitler had to be fought, not bound to toothless agreements.

Appeasement legitimized and stabilized Communism in the Soviet Union, then East Germany, then all the rest of Eastern Europe where for decades, inhuman, suppressive, murderous governments were glorified as the ideologically correct alternative to all other possibilities.

Appeasement crippled Europe when genocide ran rampant in Kosovo, and, even though we had absolute proof of ongoing mass-murder, we Europeans debated and debated and debated, and were still debating when finally the Americans had to come from halfway around the world, into Europe yet again, and do our work for us.

Rather than protecting democracy in the Middle East, European appeasement, camouflaged behind the fuzzy word "equidistance," now countenances suicide bombings in Israel by fundamentalist Palestinians.

Appeasement generates a mentality that allows Europe to ignore nearly 500,000 victims of Saddam's torture and murder machinery and, motivated by the self-righteousness of the peace-movement, has the gall to issue bad grades to George Bush... Even as it is uncovered that the loudest critics of the American action in Iraq made illicit billions, no, TENS of billions, in the corrupt U. N. Oil-for-Food program.

Read the whole thing, along with some corrections, here.

AND MORE:

There's this from Lileks:

There's a curious nostalgia for the '70s among the old-guard institutional left; America had been humbled, which was good for humanity, and we were facing a future of scarcity and decline, which was good for the planet.

Beneath it all runs a rushing river of adolescent nihilism, roiling with contempt for that vast human stain known as Western Civilization. If it hasn't given us universal health care, gay marriage and the replacement of Wal-Marts with local co-ops by 2007, well, to hell with it. And those co-ops had better offer reusable bags for our groceries. Hemp bags.

This strain of American defeatism never died; it just slank away and chewed its tongue until the time was right. And that's now!

Read the whole thing here.