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Debating the surge
Diana West has posted as a single article her three-part column (I commented on part one here) in which she argues that the surge in Iraq was a failure. Paul of Powerline disagrees with her thesis, and she responds.
One of West’s arguments for the failure of the surge is that Iraq has become, not a pro-Western ally of the U.S., but an adversary, exactly as we would expect of a tribal Muslim Shi’ite majority country. And here, in today’s news, is further evidence of Iraq’s non-Western-friendly status:
it is planning to sue Israel for Israel’s destruction of Saddam Hussein’s nuclear reactor in 1981. Think of it: if Hussein had initiated such a suit over the loss of his reactor, which he had been building for the purpose of developing nuclear weapons to use against Israel, it would have been laughed at, even by the anti-Israel UN. But now that Iraq has been rebuilt by the U.S. as a “democratic,” “self-governing” country (though in fact Freedom House still lists Iraq as Not Free), it has acquired the patina of moral legitimacy to make such a suit, which it would not have had under Hussein. America’s supposed democratization of Iraq has thus empowered Iraq to be more troublesome to the West in some ways than it otherwise could have been. Email entry |