Compare This

Compare This - The left has been trying to chip away at the Bush Plan for rebuilding Iraq. Seems that while the Administration compared it in a broad sense with the Marshall Plan, some academics (eagerly cited by the left) have found that it's not exactly like the Marshall Plan in every single respect.

This is big stuff, when you're an academic (or a party that cites them, in or out of context, obsessively).

As Steve Gigl notes in an excellent post this morning, they don't really cite many actual dissimilarities. And when they do, Gigl notes, it doesn't always make them look all that good:

"OK, so what was the only solid reason given?

[U of Connecticut professor Imanuel] Wexler [author of "The Marshall Plan Revisited] said that unlike Iraq, the Marshall Plan nations had economic and political environments that enabled the funding to be used effectively.

Oh. Racism. Checkity-check-check!

Real headline? 'Democrats and leftist academics agree--money is wasted on backward Iraqis'"

That's been one of the interesting notes to come out of the anti-Bush left's approach to Iraq - the incipient racism. Remember the claims (these go back decades) that Arabs just didn't value freedom like we do?

A few months ago, during the WMD fracas, a friend of mine - an engineer and a local "moderate" lefty - said "I hardly think Iraq has an Edward Teller in the lineup."

Look at that statement. Leave aside the facial absurdity of the strawman (you don't NEED Edward Teller to build a copy of an atomic bomb, to say nothing of a "dirty bomb"), and note the racist undertone; Iraq, that nation of little brown people descended from the people that helped develop algebra and astronomy while people in the West were living in huts made of offal and paying tribute to thugs in tin suits just couldn't develop a person of genius comparable to one of ours, could it?

Back on point; call the plan what you want, compare it any way you choose with any other plan throughout history (it won't take you long, there's really been only one). The technicalities only draw you away from the real point; If we stay our course, Iraq will most likely grow to be a solid democracy.

And I think that thought terrorizes some on the left. Too many, to be sure.

Posted by Mitch at September 29, 2003 08:35 AM