Democracy's rise shames left's pessimists

[Woodmonkey]

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[Snowden]

A marvelous find, Katie. A couple things leap out at me that will call for discourse, so I might as well start the ball rolling! For one thing:

Yet for the victims of contemporary monsters still actively killing and oppressing -- Khomeini and his successors, the Assads of Syria and, until yesterday, Saddam and his sons -- nothing. No sympathy. No action. Indeed virulent hostility to America's courageous and dangerous attempt at rescue.

What a shame we can't point to this as the reason we went in! The UN wouldn't hear of it, but the result was that we went in to find weapons of mass destructio that we have yet to find. We, the people of this country, knew that the people of Iraq had to be rescued from Saddam and his men. Otherwise the swamp Arabs, and all the Shi'ites there, stood a good chance of being eradicated. So did the Kurds, who had aleady been forcibly moved from Kirkut and other lands belonging to them. And we still have suspicions about those oil fields.

But whatever the reason Bush felt strongly enough motivated by in order to go into Iraq, those people now have a slim chance for freedom. God help them. I hope they can make it - they have started feeling the freedom now, I believe. The elections seem to have done that.

For which Arab people do European hearts burn? The Palestinians. Why? Because that permits the vilification of Israel -- an outpost of Western democracy and, even worse, a staunch U.S. ally. Championing suffering Iraqis, Syrians and Lebanese offers no such satisfaction.

Hence, silence.

Whatever it takes to spread anti-Semitism in Europe and elsewhere, it can be easily found. Even a Christian bishop's wife once said to me, "We know why we needed the Jews; to bring us Jesus. That's done now. We don't need them any more."

That has stuck in my craw for about 20 years now. "We don't need them any more." Maybe not; we don't know that. But need or no need, they are human beings who have a history of being hated. Just for being who they are.

Nobody else is so hated for so little reason.

[Woodmonkey]

Thanks, Marianne. Some other things leaped out at me in this article.

But we do know one thing: Those who claimed, with great certainty, that Arabs are an exception to the human tendency to freedom, that they live in a stunted and distorted culture that makes them love their chains, and that the notion that the U.S. could help trigger a democratic revolution by militarily deposing their oppressors was a fantasy -- have been proved wrong.

I've heard over and over again that the Arabs cannot have democracy. It's been a mantra, and a rather arrogant one at that. It is the same as saying that they aren't capable of being other than sheep bleating what they are told to bleat.

This amazing display has prompted a wave of soul-searching. When a Le Monde editorial titled "Arab Spring" acknowledges "the merit of George W. Bush," when the cover headline of London's The Independent is "Was Bush Right After All?," when a column in Der Spiegel asks "Could George W. Bush be Right?" you know that something radical has happened.

It appears that some are watching closely.

The left's patronizing quasi-colonialist view of the benighted Arabs was not just analytically incorrect. It was morally bankrupt, too.

After all, going back at least to the Spanish Civil War, the left has always prided itself as the great international champion of freedom and human rights. And yet when America proposed to remove the man responsible for torturing, gassing and killing tens of thousands of Iraqis, the left suddenly turned into a champion of Westphalian sovereign inviolability.

I wonder just how much keeping the Arabs "in their place" has played in some of the resistence to Iraq being freed. What would free thinking Arabs threaten ... besides some Imams and other ME dictators?

The international left's concern for human rights turns out to be nothing more than a useful weapon for its anti-Americanism. Jeane Kirkpatrick pointed out this selective concern for the victims of U.S. allies (like Chile) 25 years ago. After the Cold War, the hypocrisy continues.

It has always been amazing to me how they pick and choose their outrage.

A Lebanese, amid a sea of a million other Lebanese, raises a placard reading "Thank you, George W. Bush," and all that Euro-pretense, moral and intellectual, collapses.

Yes.