Iraqis fleeing freedom for dictatorship

So great is the desire of human beings to live under the neoconservatives’ notion of freedom and democracy, and so successful has been George W. Bush’s effort to create freedom and democracy in Iraq, that Iraqis have been leaving their country in droves to live under the Syrian tyranny, where at least they will feel physically safe. According to the Christian Science Monitor, so large is the influx of Iraqi immigrants into Syria and Jordan that real estate prices and apartment rentals have doubled, tripled, quadrupled.

The Bush team and their journalistic cheerleaders are the first people in history who actually believe that the holding of an election (which could only be held by locking the whole country down under armed guard) equals freedom, and that such freedom can exist in a society subject to daily terrorist mass murders. Now don’t misunderstand. Far be it from me to attack freedom. I’m attacking the monstrous conceit of the Bushites that freedom precedes security and safety, or, even wackier, that freedom is the necessary condition for security and safety, rather than the other way around. Hasn’t a single one of the Bushites read Hobbes and Locke, who wrote that the primary human instinct, preceding and conditioning all politics, is the desire to avoid violent death?

Posted by Lawrence Auster at July 24, 2005 06:23 PM | Send