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Monday, August 05, 2002
Oh, this is just wonderful. The estimable Instapundit applauds some yutz, who opines: But there's a much more basic reason to crush Saddam Hussein's regime. The Islamic world -- mainly the Arab Islamic world -- needs to realize that it has failed. Medieval Islam cannot compete with liberal capitalism either economically or culturally. Unfortunately, that message has taken several hundred years to filter through. There is nothing like cataclysmic military defeat to teach the lesson more rapidly. The yutz moves from arguing which is best justification for the preconceived war on Iraq, in the process rejecting three sane, if not politically viable or realistic, options, and settles on the above gem, which is presented as a real reason to go after Saddam. One could point at the examples of Japan and Germany after the Second World War. But the Muslim world provides its own case study. Ottoman Turkey only began to pay attention to Western science and organization after its first serious military defeats at the hands of Austria and Russia in the 17th and 18th centuries. The US needs to destroy Saddam Hussein's regime because he's a bad man, sure, because he may conceivably be connected with Al-Qaeda, because he's developing weapons of mass destruction, because a friendly Iraq would alter the balance of power in the Middle East, sure, because of all of that. But the US needs to destroy Saddam Hussein's regime mainly because the West needs to humiliate the Arab world, and dispel the Islamic millenial fantasy. What next? Congo? Burma? Sierra Leone? Angola? All we have to do is bomb them, and they'll see the error of their ways. They won't come to the conclusion that we're heartless bastards with a morally abhorrent system that must be stopped, no matter what the price, nope. In their anguish and desperation, the remaining Iraqis won't, to a man, woman, and child, dedicate the entirety of their lives to our destruction. The rest of the countries of the 'civilized' world will come to their senses and applaud the selfless generosity with which we dispensed the beneficence of fire, death, and destruction upon the less-fortunate members of the global community. |