Phillip Adams Andrew Bolt
Dominoes of liberty
09mar05
The defeatist Left said Iraq would become an endless bloodbath. Instead, it is creating a ripple of freedom throughout the Middle East.
PHILLIP Adams, lion of the Left, writes in The Australian: "There has to be a day of reckoning on this wretched war."
Well, if he really insists.
In fact, let's start that reckoning right now. With me. And then with Adams.
Two years ago tomorrow - and nine days before the start of the war to topple Saddam Hussein, Butcher of Baghdad - I wrote this:
"The true prize of a war on Iraq will not be its oil, stolen by Saddam and soon to be returned to the Iraqi people. And it won't be just the destruction of its weapons.
"It will be the bringing of democracy to an Arab nation for the first time, and to one educated enough and secular enough to let us hope it will stick.
"It will be the start of a campaign to spread that freedom through a region that knows too little of it. Next stop: Palestine.
"And it will be the first draining of the fury and frustration that is drowning the Middle East, and washing not just millions of refugees, but hyper-tech terrorists onto Western shores.
"For that, the US will need to send far more than bombs into Iraq, and spend far longer there than the weeks this war will last."
So did such hopes prove to be lethally naive? Reckoning time.
Fact: the war did indeed last mere weeks - just three of them. We can assume already it killed far fewer people than it saved - and far, far fewer than the 100,000 Adams claims.
Fact: Saddam did steal Iraq's oil - helped, we've learned, by corrupt United Nations officials.
Mistake: Saddam no longer had all his weapons of mass destruction, but - fact - his scientists say he planned to rebuild them once the world looked away.
Fact: That now won't happen. Bye, bye, Mr Genocide.
But as I said even before the invasion - weapons and oil, while important, weren't the main prizes. The spreading of freedom to a region of autocrats would justify this war.
More facts, wonderful facts: Freedom does at last seem to be coming to the Middle East, and faster than even I dared to hope.
Palestine has indeed been the next step. The death of corrupt Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat allowed presidential elections in January that none of the terrorists once backed by Saddam or his allies dared to disrupt. And the winner, Mahmoud Abbas, last month declared a genuine truce with Israel.
Then in Iraq, an astonishing eight million people defied the suicide bombers to vote for democracy, waving ink-stained fingers in triumph in this Purple Revolution. A few months earlier, liberated Afghanistan held its own successful election.
Next, Saudi Arabia was shamed by the new buzz of democracy into holding limited municipal polls last month, while Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak gave in to the US and agreed for the first time in his 24 years of military rule to let someone run against him at the next election.
Now in Lebanon, thousands of protesters demanding freedom have forced the Syrian dictatorship to agree to end its occupation of their country, even if it gave no timetable.
Marvelled Walid Jumblatt, Lebanon's powerful Druze leader and a veteran anti-American: "It's strange for me to say it, but this process of change has started because of the American invasion of Iraq.
"I was cynical about Iraq. But when I saw the Iraqi people voting three weeks ago, eight million of them, it was the start of a new Arab world. The Syrian people, the Egyptian people, all say that something is changing. The Berlin Wall has fallen. We can see it."
All this is no accident of the war, just as it was no coincidence Libya gave up its own secret WMD programs after Saddam's fall.
Eight years ago, the main architects of Iraq's liberation demanded the US "challenge regimes hostile to our interests and values".
"We need to promote the cause of political and economic freedom aboard", if necessary "with a policy of military strength", they said in an open letter signed by current US Vice-President Dick Cheney, Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, his deputy Paul Wolfowitz and President George W. Bush's brother Jeb. They wanted what we now see, freedom growing in the Middle East.
These men and their media backers can, so far, face their reckoning with pride. But can Phillip Adams AO, flippant ABC host, Australian columnist and former chairman of the Australian Film Commission?
How would he and his fellow Leftists face their own reckoning over Iraq?
It is bad enough that so many recklessly and happily preached doom. We had Greens leader Bob Brown say the war would kill 100,000 children; academic Arabist Andrew Vincent warn it would cause "absolute chaos, I think, in the whole of the Middle East and the Muslim world", and Labor president Carmen Lawrence claim 480,000 could die, with our troops "complicit in mass murder".
Others, like the UN, predicted famine, civil war, a million refugees and an environmental catastrophe, none of which happened.
Far worse was that some actually barracked for our defeat. ABC host and Sunday Age columnist Terry Lane coolly confessed: "I want the army of my country . . . to be defeated."
Max Gillies' scriptwriter, Arena co-editor Guy Rundle, likewise wished for "a slaughter of some duration of US troops", and later sighed: "Had the Iraqis fought back tooth and nail against the coalition, my support would have been with them and against our troops."
The Age Melbourne Writers' Festival even hired as its lead speaker Tariq Ali, a Trotskyist demanding that Iraqis who helped the US rebuild their nation be shot.
But still worse than this savagery is that many in the Left mocked the very idea of Arabs having freedom. Is the Left truly so racist?
Take Rory Steele, a former ambassador to Iraq and one of 43 "eminent Australians" who signed a petition just before our last election damning the Howard Government and the war in Iraq. Declared Steele: "The invaders did this in the name of democracy, a concept unaccepted to date in the Arab world and one that is totally unrealistic for Iraq."
Unrealistic? Not to Iraqis who risked death to vote, yet Adams was just as jeering of our hopes of bringing freedom to Arabs.
A year ago this New Barbarian gloated over what he thought was the death of this dream: "There was also the lunatic proposition that, by imposing democracy by force, the US, UK (and us) would inspire the region to transform itself. What a load of ideological claptrap."
And there were his other wild claims - that the war would "create another Vietnam", "could cost Bush (and Blair) office", would end with "a Stalingrad-style battle in the city" and more.
Last year he even crowed: "The promised outbreak of peace between Israel and the Palestinians has failed to materialise."
Day of reckoning, Phillip.
There is a long way to go with many setbacks to come. Iran is still a grave threat. But democracy is dawning in the Middle East, transforming even Palestine. These are miracles that, had it been left to Adams and his kind, we'd have never seen. Without the war they opposed, Saddam would still be in power, and freedom in its grave.
Day of reckoning. Let these enemies of freedom be judged, and as harshly as they would have judged us.
bolta@heraldsun.com.au
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