The larger consequences of Iraq
Howard Sutherland writes:
Your Humanity’s Union sundown? post makes me think of some of the bad and unforeseen consequences of the Bush administration’s disastrous Mesopotamian misadventure. In addition to all the obvious ones, if it weren’t for the Iraq war and Australian Prime Minister John Howard’s support of it, the Australians probably would not now be stuck with Kevin Rudd as prime minister.
Howard wasn’t perfect; he’s a politician. But he did have some sense of Australia as the country of the Australians, and made some efforts to control immigration and insist on honoring Australian identity and history. But trying to be a good ally of the United States in the Bush administration’s War on Terr’r cost him his job. It’s hard to blame the Aussies, in a way: the American conduct of Bush’s ludicrously named War on Terror is somewhere between imbecilic and catastrophic—and not for Al-Qaeda, no matter what the “Surge” apologists say. So doggedly going along with it wasn’t the best way to appeal to the voters.
The baby-faced Rudd, on the other hand, seems to have spent most of his life trying hard to become Chinese, including issuing groveling greetings in Mandarin to Hu Jintao in the Australian Parliament. If Rudd’s not a born-again Chinaman, he’s at least a Chinese wannabe. As far as I know, it isn’t possible for a non-Chinese to become Chinese, but it’s very easy for Australian politicians (American ones, too) to become tools of the Chinese.
Similarly, Jose Maria Aznar was an imperfect Spanish prime minister, but more on our side than not. Frustrated by the Aznar government’s support for the invasion of Iraq and cowed—shamefully—by the Atocha bombings, Spaniards turned his party out of office, replacing him with Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero. Zapatero (he uses his mother’s maiden name, which comes last in a full Spanish name, rather than his real surname of Rodriguez—is this the PC feminism of a gelded Socialist, or because Rodriguez is almost as common a name as Smith?) is a horror, a complete traitor to Spain’s traditions and history.
In four years, Zapatero’s Socialists have legalized homosexual “marriage”—in Catholic Spain!, issued a massive amnesty to illegal aliens (giving them free run throughout EU member-states), pandered shamelessly to the Moslems at the expense of real Spaniards and negotiated with Basque Marxist terrorists. Zapatero’s grandfather was shot by Franco’s Falange during the Spanish Civil War, which might help explain his particular vindictive Leftism. Zapatero’s government has made a point of purging Spain of reminders of Franco, the man who more than any other saved Spain from Communism. Zapatero is also the man who saddled Spain with a pregnant pacifist and Catalan nationalist as Defense Ministress. Note with what evident lack of enthusiasm she intones “Viva Espana! Viva el rey!” in this Youtube clip.
Zapatero has lectured America about how mean we are to our Mexican neighbors, and has pursued a policy of buddying up with Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez. Again, absent the Bush administration’s idiotic Iraq invasion, it’s quite likely this Eurabian Socialist would not now be leading Spain on her current mistaken course.
LA replies:
Mr. Sutherland has left out what may be the most fateful government change resulting from Bush’s Iraq policy: the election of the leftist Barack Obama as U.S. president.
The larger disaster and tragedy is that America, instead of defending the West, invested its energies and moral authority in this insane Iraq involvement, identifying “conservatism” with that involvement, and so exhausting and discrediting conservatism and the defense of the West.
Posted by Lawrence Auster at June 12, 2008 12:00 PM | Send