In what some will think irony and others historical instruction, Iraqis brought Saddam Hussein before a judge and accepted by plebiscite the very covenant of rule by consent that Syrian dictator Bashar Assad refused Lebanon when he ordered, German prosecutor Detlev Mehlis all but confirmed, the murder of Rafiq Hariri. As the last votes cast in the constitutional referendum were being tallied and the Tikriti gangster stood in court, refusing to announce his own name, Mehlis released as United Nations chief investigator a report charting dictatorial subversion of liberal polity.
Victory in Iraq is nearly complete. It was rescued by the brave Iraqi stand in April 2004 and ensured by the January 2005 National Assembly election. Yes, the country's regular business was halted for the referendum, as with the Assembly vote — but a country beset by driven killers faces extraordinary times. And as most security measures were carried out by Iraqi forces, Iraq will soon be able to handle the extraordinary. From some there is the turbid prediction that Iraq will spend the next decades variolate with provincial skirmishes and urban bombings — unsteadily gaining its feet, more Kashmir than India, unable to completely stamp out terrorism.
That can't be. In the 1970s and 1980s non-state authoritarians known as terrorists operated in relative freedom, often enjoying the same Soviet auspices as their Near East government sponsors (or rivals). They prospered in a nebulous region of the wide, wide Cold War world, but for 1979 Tehran and 1983 Beirut going about their murderous work quietly. Through the last decade of the 20th Century, democratic states overlooked burgeoning terrorism in favor of threats from established dictatorships. In the general, now that terrorists and states guilty of their effluence are primary targets, survival means less time and attention to metastasis. And that is notwithstanding the damage they are continually taking. In the particular, when a country like Ba'athist Syria is importing Allied soldiers and diasporic liberals it cannot possibly continue exporting thugs and fanatics.
All of this is contingent on military and diplomatic prosecution. It calls for a review of the Bush doctrine, that the free world will make no distinction between terrorists and state sponsors; or, according to Bush's inaugural speech corollary, authoritarianism in all forms. Syria is an enemy of the United States and its allies. Syrians wish to be free. In mid-October the Aspen Institute's Jeff Gedmin met with Syrian exiles, led by Farid Ghadry of the Reform Party of Syria, in Paris. What did the three dozen exiles think? "Damascus is ready for meltdown." Western academics recoil at the tangled mess a fallen house of Assad would surely leave behind but Ghadry and his fellows know better — there is no such thing as a dictatorship built on honesty, faith and merit. Congress and the White House will make the decision of what exactly is to be done with Syria. But an end to terrorist invaders in Iraq and elsewhere, fulfillment of the "forward strategy of freedom": that road leads to Damascus.
Where is the left? Another event added to the confluence is, today, the number of American dead after nearly three years of Operation Iraqi Freedom rising to just 500 shy of the sum of young soldiers killed in Northern France on June 6, 1944. The message from Democrats has been mixed — which is to say, capitulatory or blithering. On Capitol Hill, Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy begged for US "extrication" from the conflict spilling, as West Virginia Senator Robert Byrd put it, "too much blood." Congressman George Miller of the Democratic Policy Committee attempted to shatter the law of non-contradiction through the use of high-speed bullet points, furnishing a plan that included depriving Iraqis an alliance with the country responsible for actually giving them the choice; replacing monies directed to political parties (i.e., democrats) with monies for what he called "democracy assistance for independent growth" (i.e., anyone); and resolving to protect Iraq against terrorists shuttled through Syria and Iran by moving "several thousand" troops back to Kuwait.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice recently visited Central Asia — the "Stans" — and in seeking more solid ties with the former Soviet republics she implored each nation's government to defend, rather than hold captive, its people. A National Public Radio broadcast on the event played a brief excerpt of the secretary's remarks. Just in case Ms. Rice's statement inspired anyone, the NPR announcer reminded listeners that when the secretary departed Kazakhstan was still being run by a strongman.
That is the left — if you doubt it for a moment simply examine mainstream reporting and opinion columns, or other leftist forums. America is condemned for looking on while a population is violated by a dictatorship, condemned for gently pressuring reform in that dictatorship, condemned for militarily initiating or assisting a forceful native liberalization of that dictatorship; and, finally, condemned for presiding over the once-oppressed population's difficult withdrawal from an unbroken tradition of dictatorship. The allegation shape-shifts but stably orbits a conviction of American culpability.
Sadly, the twin examples of Iraq and Afghanistan are not enough to preclude equivocation from those who will make no inference of universality. Progressives can expect to hear how Syria is not like Iraq, nor Iran; and how the suggestion of military exertion to liberate either is not only distasteful but inconsistent, since the policy does not extend to Egypt or Jordan or Saudi Arabia, where the White House has chosen diplomacy to effect reform. The debate will go on and on, democratists hounded by the contention of the left.
But should the war proceed favorably, and the Near East liberalizes with the miraculous peripety of Eastern Europe, bringing quick, consecutive ends to dictators who have for years served the left's ad hominem tu quoque against American moralism, the matter becomes crystalline. There will no longer be another way, a should've-could've from the Democratic Party, since the Bush doctrine's medium-term objectives will have been met. The question to opponents of intervention shall then be: Do you support the unconditional advance and concord of democratic sovereignty through the eradication of tyranny? — do you believe men must be free?
Well, do you?
