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Tuesday, April 22, 2003
posted by gbarto at 2:44 AM:
Cicero says:And, if we aren't going to seriously occupy Iraq for a while, hoping to use that time to ensure that, when we leave, it won't fall into the hands of the Jihad and be even less firendly for us than it was before, then we should just declare victory and withdraw from the whole of the Middle East.He's dead wrong on the last point for reasons made beautifully clear in a delightful riff in Rushdie's The Ground Beneath Her Feet. Notes Rushdie, when we left Vietnam, many thought we had lost the war. But in fact, after we left there remained a Trojan horse. When the Vietnamese settled down and stopped paying attention, our most devastating shock troops emerged, stormed and occupied the country. Specifically, rock and roll, blue jeans, fast cars, and the father of them all, consumerist capitalism. Nothing short of the death of everyone in the Middle East who saw the footage of Saddam's statue coming down, saw the easy confidence with which Arab journalists could talk to our troops, saw the way that demonstrations against our occupation were greeted with shrugs of "they're allowed to do that now," will - to mix metaphors - put the genie in the bottle. President Bush is right. So long as we are a beacon of hope and freedom in the world, we will have enemies in the world. Jihad is at the top of the list, with its idea that submission, not freedom, is what the world needs and it will be our enemy until one or the other perishes. So, to quote by turns Martin Luther King, Jr. and Ronald Reagan: Let freedom ring and may God bless America.
ALL of it.
And announce to the world that peace in Palestine is a matter for the parties direclty involved to work out - or not - on their own, with no kibbitzing from us at all.
And watch the Muslim Jihad everywhere lose interest in attacking the United States.
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