[Dean's World] Dave Price: Pessimism, Patience, Perception, and Perspective

[notify at powerblogs.com]

Posted by Dave Price:
Pessimism, Patience, Perception, and Perspective
http://www.deanesmay.com/posts/1170884980.shtml


   With support for the decision to liberate Iraq [1]dropping to around
   35%, I'm beginning to understand how those who wanted to abolish
   slavery here in America must have felt in early 1864, something along
   the lines of âThe cause was just and I still believe in this war to
   free those whose most basic rights are being denied, but thank God no
   one knew how bloody this was going to be because the American people
   would never have gone for it.â Unfortunately, it's unlikely there will
   be any modern analogue to Sherman capturing Atlanta to bring public
   opinion back around; probably the most we could hope is a gradual
   diminishing in violence, and we may not even get that for a very long
   time â and it increasingly appears stabilizing Iraq may require some
   residual American presence for decades hence.
   But as Jon Hall puts it, â[2]Liberty is too precious to be placed in
   the hands of public opinion.â If that sounds undemocratic or elitist,
   consider that our cherished Bill of Rights is likewise anti-democratic
   in the name of freedom, full of declarations that âCongress shall make
   no lawâ regardless of whether the electorate thinks restricting
   certain freedoms is a good idea. Paul Davis also [3]provides evidence
   that public opinion polls are probably not the best way to run a war
   -- notwithstanding how well the finger-to-the-wind tactic might work
   for opportunistic and unprincipled politicians (redundant, I know).
   But these are not mainstream opinions; hereâs [4]a column from David
   Ignatius, very typical MSM fodder in its gloom, assumption of failure,
   and treatment of a collection of tyrants as neutral observers of the
   project to democratize Iraq (and in that vein, he of course tosses in
   the inevitable, laughable idea of brokering an Arab-Israeli peace that
   few Arab governments want, or indeed perhaps could even survive).

     The current conflict isn't just a civil war, the analysts noted;
     it's worse -- with criminal gangs, al Qaeda terrorists and Shiite
     internal feuding adding to the anarchic state of the country.
     ...
     -- Push for Arab-Israeli peace. The one thing everyone in the
     region seems to agree on -- from Israel to Saudi Arabia -- is the
     need for a Palestinian state.
     ...
     The risks were summed up by Amr Moussa, the head of the Arab
     League. The war in Iraq "opened the gates of Hell," he told me, and
     if the conflict expands to Iranian-backed Shiites and Sunni Arabs,
     "we will enter Hell itself."

   â...unleashed Hell,â eh? What was Iraq under Saddam, then? Husseinâs
   regime can conservatively be held responsible for about 2 million
   deaths, counting his various wars of conquest (the war with Iran alone
   is believed to have claimed around a million lives), civil wars, and
   general day-to-day domestic Stalinist brutality. That works out to an
   average of 83,000 a year over his 24-year reign, and that number is
   artificially low because he was stifled to some extent since 1991 by
   the presence of no-fly zones and U.S./U.K. troops. The far-left
   anti-war anti-military site Iraq Body Count has found a total of
   around 60,000 civilians killed for the nigh on four years of
   occupation. With the approximately 20,000 non-civilian casualties,
   that works out to about 20,000 a year, making Iraq under Saddam, on
   average, about four times more violent than it has been since the
   invasion, to say nothing of [5]going from one of the least free
   countries in the Mideast to one of the most free.
   Of course, for the [6]Arab League the idea of free people electing
   their governments and holding them accountable for results may indeed
   be Satanic. Hell is often in the eye of the beholder.

References

   1. http://www.pollingreport.com/iraq.htm
   2. http://www.thetimesherald.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070207/OPINION03/702070316/1014/OPINION
   3. http://www.mysanantonio.com/opinion/stories/MYSA020407.4H.daviscomment.44caab.html
   4. http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2007/02/more_troops_wont_stop_the_civi.html
   5. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/4450582.stm
   6. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_league