From: TYUTYUTYUTYUIT@GHJGKHJGKHJKGHJ.COM   
      
   enjoy....   
      
   The Spectator, w/ending 22 May   
      
      
      
   FEATURES   
   Cursed are the peaceniks   
   James Delingpole gives both barrels to the 'pea-brained' isolationists who   
   fill the papers - even The Spectator - with their defeatist snivelling   
   Anyone who has ever smoked will be familiar with that awful sinking feeling   
   you get when, one by one, your fellow nicotine-addict friends start to quit.   
   United you feel strong, happy, immune to the finger-wagging of health   
   fascists and probably even to lung cancer, secure in the knowledge that for   
   all their minor defects, tabs are basically great and possibly better than   
   sex. But as the number of smokers in your circle dwindles, so too does your   
   morale. You feel depressed, insecure, let down. You start wondering whether   
   maybe it's not time that you too did the cowardly thing and went over to the   
   other side....   
      
   At the moment I'm feeling much the same way about the Iraq war. The analogy   
   isn't quite perfect, because whereas I recognise that stopping smoking makes   
   very good sense, no one is ever going to persuade me that the Iraq war was a   
   mistake. But I've definitely experienced a similar sense of hurt, confusion   
   and betrayal at that growing number of hacks who once understood, like me,   
   why the war was a right and noble cause, but who have now been panicked by   
   events such as the Abu Ghraib prison scandal into snivelling, breast-beating   
   recantation.   
      
   One day the U-turner is Vanity Fair's David Rose in the Evening Standard;   
   the next it's Martin Wolf in the Financial Times and Johann Hari in the   
   Independent; then Mary Ann Sieghart and Anatole Kaletsky in the Times. And   
   let's not even mention the embarrassing bout of craven peacenik-ery which   
   has broken out not just in the Mail, but also in our very own Speccie.   
      
   For me, the final straw came when - as I so often do at difficult   
   geopolitical times - I turned for consolation to the weblog of Andrew   
   Sullivan and found that even this wise, articulate, principled defender of   
   the war had suddenly come over a touch wobbly. The next day, admittedly, his   
   resolve had been stiffened by all the 'Et tu, Sully?' emails he'd had from   
   his readers. But by then the damage had been done. 'Bloody hell,' I thought.   
   'Whatever next? Michael Gove says, "Sod Israel and give it back to the   
   peace-loving Palestinians?" Mark Steyn, writing after his fortnight's Cuban   
   jaunt with Noam Chomsky and Susan Sontag, says, "Michael Moore for   
   President!"?'   
      
   Of course, I appreciate as much as the next struggling hack the need to be   
   flexible with one's opinions. The Abu Ghraib scandal definitely helped   
   create a seller's market for stories on the lines of 'How terribly, terribly   
   guilty I am for having supported the war, now that I realise we're just as   
   bad as them.' More recently, the vile beheading of Nick Berg has created an   
   equally strong market for ones going, 'Oh no, hang on. They are worse than   
   us after all.' Maybe - money-grubbing whores as most of us are - it's too   
   much to expect any journalist to demonstrate virtues like consistency,   
   responsibility or maturity. But I do think in the case of Iraq we ought to   
   struggle to make an exception. It is, after all, the issue on which our   
   security and stability for the next 50 odd years most depend.   
      
   Instead, though, we all seem increasingly determined to follow the   
   hysterical narrative dictated to us largely by the hand-wringing liberal   
   Left. Its primary thesis goes something like, 'Sure global terrorism is a   
   bit of a worry. But hey, what do we expect when a neo-imperialist bully boy   
   like America is throwing its weight around, winding up the "Arab Street"?   
   This isn't really about fundamentalist Islam. It's about American hegemony,   
   about oil, about Dubya's dad's unfinished business, the Jewish lobby,   
   Palestine, etc., etc., etc.'   
      
   Now, clearly, if you want to view Iraq through that prism, as so much of the   
   Western media do, you're going to find no shortage of examples to support   
   your case. Just dispatch your reporters to where the action is - Fallujah,   
   say, or Najaf; make sure they steer well clear of the hundreds of   
   similar-sized towns in the vastness of Iraq where life post-Saddam is   
   proving pretty peaceful and hunky-dory; seek out for interview anyone who's   
   been beaten in prison or had their child killed by US gunships; go big on   
   the body bag and blown-up Humvee pictures. Et voilà: quagmire.   
      
   Every now and then, there'll come along a story which has the anti-war lobby   
   punching the air with glee and which gives even pro-war people like me pause   
   for thought. First was the one about the looting of Baghdad Museum's   
   greatest treasures (until it was inconveniently discovered to be tosh); more   
   recently we've had the great Shia rebellion (that never was, because most   
   Shiites think al-Sadr's a prat); followed by Abu Ghraib, which I concede has   
   a stronger foundation than most, is a spectacular own goal, a violation of   
   human rights and so on, but which I still think is blinding rather too many   
   journalists to the bigger picture, so busy as they are trying to explain why   
   it is that being photographed naked with a female prison guard is every bit   
   as appalling an ordeal as, say, being decapitated with a knife or blown to   
   pieces by a suicide bomber.   
      
   Here's a thing that puzzles me. Before the Iraq war started, I remember   
   trawling through dozens and dozens of learned articles which all pointed out   
   that however difficult the invasion might prove, the post-war settlement in   
   a country with so many different tribal and religious factions and no recent   
   tradition of democracy would be trickier. Yet now we're at that tricky   
   post-war settlement stage, everyone's suddenly acting as though Iraq's more   
   like Tunbridge Wells and our failure to create instant harmony among such a   
   pliant, peaceable population is an international disgrace.   
      
   I believe the Iraq invasion was the right thing to do for the same reasons I   
   always did. The discovery of WMDs would have been a bonus, but they were   
   never the real issue. Nor - being grotesquely realpolitik-ish about this -   
   was the freedom of the Iraqis, absolutely delighted though I am that they've   
   been rescued from decades of suffering and torture far worse than anything   
   the Americans have ever inflicted.   
      
   Rather, the Iraqi invasion happened and ought to have happened because it is   
   part of a long, ambitious but very necessary campaign to tip a wavering   
   Islamic world towards stable, capitalist, peaceful, liberal democracy. If   
   there's one thing the West ought to have learnt from the escalation of   
   terrorist atrocities in the last decade - from the tourist massacre in Luxor   
   through to 9/11 and Madrid - it's that its policy of appeasement towards   
   Islamic terrorists and the regimes which fund or harbour them hasn't worked.   
   The growth of Islamofascism needs to be acknowledged for the global menace   
   it is and confronted at any and every opportunity. To pull out of Iraq now   
   at its greatest hour of need would not only make a nonsense of the invasion'   
      
   [continued in next message]   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)