Winning The Peace - They've

Winning The Peace - They've been wrong about everything so far.

Liberals, that is. They were wrong about the importance of Al Quaeda. They were wrong about how to deal with Al Quaeda (letting the leadership slip out of countless traps, then trying to "solve" the problem with a pair of Tomahawk missiles). They were wrong about Afghanistan. They were wrong about the UN, Hanx Blix, Weapons of Mass Destruction (oh, we have to prove that one again. And we will). They were wrong about whether the war would turn into a quagmire - twice (once before and once during the war). They were wrong about whether we had too many troops, then wrong about whether we had too few. They were wrong about Baghdad and Basra becoming new synomyms for Stalingrad. They were wrong about the hidden resolve the the Iraqi military, and a few dozen things in and among all of those that I've forgotten.

So the left's last-ditch bleat - even among some who are otherwise reasonable - is that we're going to "lose the peace".

Mark Steyn's been there. He disagrees.

On the Hugh Hewitt show a few minutes ago, he reported that "19 out of 20 Iraqis are very, very happy with things. And in this article, in the Telegraph - part of a long series of pieces available on his website, he further assails the notion that Iraq is a steaming cauldron of discontent, ready to blow up in our collective face.

Too many money quotes to pick just one, but here's a good one:

In Ramadi, in another cafe, the maitre d', in honour of my presence, flipped the television over to BBC World. Some Beeb type was doing a piece about some Baghdadi who hadn't been paid since March. Now what sort of fellow hasn't been paid since March? A chap who worked for the toppled thug government perhaps? Might be a committed thug ideologue, might be just a go-along-to-get-along type. But, given that the new Iraqi government is never going to be as huge as the old one, maybe that chap should just stop whining to the BBC and look for a gig in the private sector. Ditto for the BBC reporter, come to that.

As usual, the piece wound up with the correspondent standing in the children's ward of the Saddam Hussein Medical Centre predicting more doom and gloom. By contrast, every medical facility I went to in Iraq was well short of capacity. The NGO types concede that Iraqis aren't exactly rushing the hospitals, but say that's because they know that there are no drugs and/or they're worried that they can't afford them. Might be that. Or it might be that they don't want to be stuck on a ward trying to get a moment's sleep under the blazing lights of round-the-clock CNN and BBC camera crews filming their reporter yakking away in front of a telegenic moppet whose acute tonsillitis is somehow all Rumsfeld's fault. These days, I always laugh my head off at BBC World reports. And, in that Ramadi cafe, I was touched to find that, even though most of them hadn't a clue what he was going on about, within half a minute, the rest of the crowd was roaring along with me.

Read...yep, the whole thing.

UPDATE: Midwest Conservative Journal has another excellent piece on the same topic.

Posted by Mitch at June 4, 2003 06:34 PM