I have no respect for authoritarians' utter lack of vision; whatever they claim drives their cruelty and torment is not so great as the selfish will to dominate and consume. No matter how brilliant history's conquerers may be described as, their failure and downfall has always come from a destructive esurience; an ultimately uncontrollable need for the infliction of pain and the distention of power. It is a simple, thoughtless need. Evil men, from diabolical propagandists to simple thugs, mock principle and code. There is no divide between Pan-Arabist and Islamist or Sunni and Shiite when those beliefs are hollowed out by a hatred of free will and a desire to subvert and enslave. But even the mindlessness of animals can succeed in disarming men. The authoritarians' most formidable asset is a tactical one: the immediate and overwhelming use of violence to sow fear and doubt, and gain submission. The threats free nations face, dictators and terrorists, are aided by modern and 20th-Century inventions. Even while terrorists' indiscriminate obsession with killing is often fed at the expense of strategic concerns, terrorists succeed in disspiriting the lukewarm and morally disinterested. For those who look no further than the slaughter of innocents, lacking faith in free societies to withstand the rule of force, the simplistic acts of murders in the short term could very well win entire wars.
Yesterday morning I heard on television what appears to have become a insistent canard among relativist doubters of the relationship between extremist culture and oppression, terrorists and dictatorships: that indeed, Arabs weren't meant for free and peaceful societies. The Allies should wash their hands and leave. That one final, poorly conceived gasp of killing and brutalizing is enough to condemn millions; never mind that Moqtada al-Sadr's days are numbered, or nearly fifty thugs have died in Fallujah for every American Marine, or that Iraqis - as worried and bleak as some may be - will take every measure to live freely, more as they build confidence in their ability as a people. Relativists claim that the very forces impeding the transition to liberal democracy are intrinsic elements of Iraqi society; they're wrong. I heard one man talk of "tribal chieftains" being given the chance to struggle for control, as if all Iraqis were savages - rather than, as in every other dark place on the earth, decent people held under tyranny by a murderous few. Were feudal thugs immutable from within Western civilization? Or monarchy? Or exclusive suffrage? And do these people believe for a moment that failed, strife-ridden states aren't exactly where terrorists seek to embed themselves - have they already forgotten Afghanistan?
On this weblog I have maintained for nearly two years that the war on terror will only be won when the Near East has been democratized. Iraq's liberation is the first and most critical stage of that campaign. Abandoning millions to certain recapture by strongmen would be on one hand unconscionable, antithetical to the laws that gird our way of life; and on the other, a tragic, early end to the realization of freedom for all men.
The free world has come far - Chief Wiggles explains why. And we need not be discouraged nor surprised by the retaliation of authoritarians; Wretchard and Ali know why.
FOG ROLLS IN: Steven Den Beste analyzes the latest wide discrepancy between what many press agencies report and what actually happened. Most egregious is the insinuation that the ceasefire in Fallujah is somehow the product of an American military failure. But most reports place "Iraqi" deaths in the hundreds - six hundred now the prevailing number. Marines, whose losses are apparently so low as to not warrant mention by an otherwise casualty-eager media, believe most of those dead were combatants. [I've also seen more than one report combine all American casualties from the beginning of the month of April or earlier, then insert that figure into the same sentence as Fallujah terrorist casualties. Obviously they don't draw from the best source. I count thirty deaths in al Anbar Province, which includes several trouble spots.] Add the fact that Marine reinforcement proceeded during negotiations, and the last week in Fallujah appears to have been the first part of a rout by American forces.
