Cleaning up the Middle East
George W. Bush has delivered, to my mind, one of the most important foreign policy speeches in the last 15 years. Christian Brose calls it “The Bush Revolution” in a guest commentary over at NRO. You can call it whatever you want, but I call it the reason we went to war. Not WMD, not terrorism, not Saddam, but cleaning up that backwards cesspool we call the Middle East. And I mean that in the nicest possible way. It’s just this: the Middle East is the World’s Biggest Fucking Problem™. We saw an opportunity in Iraq to get rid of a bad guy and remove a terrorist haven, but more importantly, embark on an (admittedly idealistic) plan to change the Middle East and the world. The means is democratization, the end is security, and—unfortunately—the catalyst is war.
And to think, at this stage of the game, there are many who’d have us pull out tomorrow. They want to “bring our troops home.” They want the $87.5 billion to be loans, not grants. But wait. Wasn’t it you guys who were chanting “No blood for oil!” in the streets a few months ago (on your time off from your jobs at Starbucks)? Square this for me: you don’t want us in Iraq “for the money,” and yet you want their tattered economy paying back the money? Where’s the logic in that?
And throughout all of this, the European spin machine is hard at work. It’s really unfair to call it a spin machine—maybe “virtual reality machine” would be more accurate. For every development in Iraq, the European press works hard at blaming the Americans. No wonder a recent EU poll found that Europeans ranked Israel and the U.S. as the top two countries threatening world peace! I shall have to set aside the discussion of rampant European anti-Semitism for another time, but the poll begs the simple question: Are all of you that fucking stupid? Maybe that sounds a bit coarse, but does a guy in Austria actually fear America more than Islamic terrorists? Well, I guess so, and that’s why it’s a “virtual reality machine.” The Euro-Luddites are truly weaving an alternate reality for themselves.
Bottom line: We’re in Iraq for the long haul. Whether you agreed with this war at the outset—and I had mixed feelings—it would be positively disastrous to jump ship at this point. In fact, it would be singularly un-humanitarian. No doubt another brutal regime would rise to replace Saddam’s. If liberals’ true interest is in human welfare, why is that their “core values” are always parsed by political circumstances?