FEATURES
It’s been a good year
Ignore the sneering
metropolitan elites, says Mark Steyn: George
Bush is winning at home and abroad
New Hampshire
In California, Muslim community leaders have applauded
the decision of the Catholic high school in San Juan
Capistrano to change the name of its football team
from the Crusaders to the less culturally insensitive
Lions.
Meanwhile, 20 miles up the road in Irvine, the Muslim
Football League’s New Year tournament will bring
together some of the most exciting Muslim football
teams in Orange County: the Intifada, the Mujahideen,
the Saracens and the Sword of Allah.
That’s the spirit. I can’t wait for the California
sporting calendar circa 2010: the San Diego Jihadi vs
the Oakland Sensitives, the Malibu Hezbollah vs the
Santa Monica Inoffensives, the Pasadena Sword of the
Infidel Slayer vs the Bakersfield Self-Deprecators.
Like the unfortunate Mr Colin Rose, fired from his
prison officer’s post at Blundeston jail for making an
‘inappropriate’ remark about Osama bin Laden that
could easily have distressed large numbers of his
Muslim jailbirds, we must all try harder to avoid
giving offence. Especially at this time of year, when
the streets are full of exclusionary imagery —snowmen,
reindeer, Yuletide logs, all evoking the time when the
crusading white men of northern Europe rode their
reindeer into the streets of Damascus hurling blazing
Yule logs at Muslims.
So I have made a New Year’s resolution — or, if you
can’t say that any more, an Eid resolution — to be
extra-super-sensitive as we look at the state of play
at the close of 2003. First of all, I’m amazed that we
can still win anything, given the palpable urge of the
Western world’s elites to abase themselves in the name
of multiculturalism. Their position is basically that
of Bernd Brandes, the computer engineer eaten by the
German cannibal: go ahead, devour me, but chop my
penis off first so I can watch you sauté it. But if
the deal is that for every Islamic regime we overthrow
we have to rename ten California sports teams, I think
I can live with it. Yay, go, Sword of Allah!
Other than that, it’s been a good year. Twelve months
ago, Saddam Hussein was sitting on his solid gold
toilet. He’s now on the run, moving every few hours
and unlikely ever again to feel even a standard black
plastic seat against his bottom. His sons are dead, so
there’s no possibility of dynastic succession. There
has been a noticeable decline in the number of suicide
bombings against Israel, suggesting the intifada is
having some problems without its sugar daddy.
Conversely, there’s been an increase in pressure on
the Saudi Arabian and Iranian regimes.
Not bad. Meanwhile, certain problems seem to have
vanished entirely. A year ago, we were told that
millions would die as Bush plunged Iraq into a
humanitarian disaster, driving vast tides of refugees
to destabilise neighbouring countries and leaving
those who were left with a choice of starvation,
cholera or dysentery: ‘The head of the World Food
Programme has warned that Iraq could spiral into a
massive humanitarian disaster,’ etc. For the first
three months after liberation, the Big Consciences
lobby attempted to argue that this humanitarian
disaster was, in fact, happening: you’ll recall Will
Day of Care International piling on the 500,000 tonnes
of raw sewage in his column for the Daily Telegraph,
‘Things Are Getting Worse In Iraq, So Give The UN A
Chance’. Mr Day demanded to know: ‘How long will it be
before we see this contamination seriously affect the
health of the population?’
As I responded back in June, ‘Seriously? Never.’
And so it seems to be. After some particularly vicious
bombings of the UN and others, the NGOs mostly fled
Iraq in late summer. ‘It would be rather sobering,’ I
wrote in August, ‘were Iraq to demonstrate it can get
along without them.’ And what do you know? It’s
remarkable how quickly a problem goes away once the
people with a vested interest in there being a problem
go away.
The same thing would happen if the media fled Iraq.
They have the same interest in a ‘Vietnam quagmire’
that the NGOs have in a ‘humanitarian catastrophe’,
and if anything they work even more assiduously at
promoting it. Claudine Vernier-Palliez and Jerome
Sessini of Paris-Match spent several days holed up
with ‘Iraqi guerrillas’ and were rewarded by being
allowed to photograph the ‘guerrillas’ shooting down a
DHL cargo plane. Fabulous pictures, darling! It would
have been even better if it had been a Black Hawk, but
maybe next time. It must be great fun for Paris-Match
types to play society photographer to Baathist
dead-enders, and no doubt it makes a nice change from
snapping Princess Stephanie, but it’s hard to see what
anybody else gets out of it. Since I returned from my
own jaunt around Iraq, I’ve received a steady flow of
emails from serving soldiers and Iraqi Internet
wallahs, and I’ve made a point of seeking out
dispatches from non-media visitors to the country.
Almost everyone, including Democratic Congressmen,
comes back reporting progress and cautious optimism.
Meanwhile, anyone who thinks it will be decades before
Arabs are ready for a Western-style society should
consider the case of ‘Salam Pax’, an Iraqi Internet
blogger —or ‘blogger’, as we old-media types say — who
made a name for himself with his on-the-spot Baghdad
diary in the run-up to the war and subsequently got
taken on by the Guardian and brought to London. When
Bush came to town last month, Salam was one of those
whom the Guardian asked to pen an open letter to the
President:
‘I hate to wake you up from that dream you are having,
the one in which you are a superhero bringing
democracy and freedom to underdeveloped, oppressed
countries. But you really need to check things out in
one of the countries you have recently bombed to
freedom ...Listen, habibi, it is not over yet. Let me
explain this in simple terms. You have spilled a glass
full of tomato juice on an already dirty carpet and
now you have to clean up the whole room. Not all of
the mess is your fault but you volunteered to clean it
up. I bet if someone had explained it to you like
that, you would have been less hasty going on our
Rambo-in-Baghdad trip.’
Incredible. At the beginning of this year Salam Pax
was just another typical oppressed Baghdadi, four of
whose relatives had ‘gone missing’ (according to his
Guardian biog.). But a couple of weeks in the company
of Guardian editors and he’s been transformed into a
note-perfect, sneering, metropolitan poseur, right
down to the two-decade-old Rambo putdown. He sounds
like a Channel 4 commissioning editor. Now you might
think this is a tad ungrateful of Salam: some of that
tomato juice on the rug is from his four missing
relatives and, given that the Americans have seen to
it that his own juice is no longer in danger of
hitting the shagpile, it might be nice if he
understood that, in the end, it’s in his interest to
clean up the room more than Rambo’s. But personally I
find it heartening: if the Americans can’t transform
Iraq into New Hampshire, this snotty little twerp is
living proof that you can at least turn it into
Islington.
As for the naysayers who’ve been neighing a lot longer
than Salam, if I were one of their cult followers, I’d
be getting a little tired of the worst-case scenarios.
Bush lied!!!! Blair lied!!!!!! But Noam Chomsky is
admirably candid. He gave an interview to readers of
the Independent the other day, and, in the midst of
the general fawning, Mike Dudley of Ipswich asked a
sharp little question: ‘Where is the “silent genocide”
you predicted would happen in Afghanistan if the US
intervened there in 2001?’
‘That is an interesting fabrication, which gives a
good deal of insight into the prevailing moral and
intellectual culture,’ replied Noam. ‘I predicted
nothing. Rather, I reported the grim warnings from
virtually every knowledgeable source that the attack
might lead to an awesome humanitarian catastrophe
...The warnings remain accurate as well, a truism that
should be unnecessary to explain. Unfortunately, it is
apparently necessary to add a moral truism: actions
are evaluated in terms of the range of anticipated
consequences.’
In fairness, Noam is speaking the truth — or, as he’d
say, the truism. What he said on 18 October 2001 is:
‘Looks like what’s happening is some sort of silent
genocide.’ In other words, it wasn’t a prediction. It
was already taking place. The only predictive element
was when he estimated the final death toll of
slaughtered Afghans at ‘Three to four million people
or something like that’.
Whenever I write that the anti-war side is now living
in its own self-created alternative reality, they
write back to point out that I’m the one in the
alternative universe. ‘Yes, we Bush-haters live in our
“own little world”, but that rapidly shrinking world’s
name is Reality,’ writes Rosamond Fogg. ‘So dream on,
Mark, stay in your contrived, photo-op dream and pray
you don’t wake up.’
A reasonable point. Who am I to say which of us is in
the matrix and which has taken the reality pill? But a
good indicator is a consistent narrative. And I have
to say, if I were in Rosamond’s shoes, the number of
storylines my guys abandon or dismiss as a dream
sequence (‘an interesting fabrication’) would be
beginning to rattle me. Hey, what about those three to
four million dead? Don’t worry, it’s like when Bobby
Ewing got killed off in Dallas and then they brought
him back (special 1980s cultural reference in honour
of Salam Pax): Victoria Principal steps into the
shower and finds four million Afghans in there, and ol’
Noam says pay no attention to the lurch in continuity.
He’ll be having to do that a lot more in the year
ahead.
The extreme Left has made a terrible strategic mistake
shacking up with the Islamists. In one sense, they’re
not as incompatible as they might appear: Islamism may
be religious in origin but in its political form it is
simply this decade’s brand of oppressive statism, as
communism was before it. But the only question now is
how deeply this strategic error infects the less
insane Left. On National Public Radio the other day,
Howard Dean advanced the theory that the Saudis had
tipped off Bush about 9/11 in advance. When the
Democratic presidential front-runner is cheerfully
wearing his tinfoil hat in public, it’s no wonder the
other fellows are scrambling to sound just as loopy.
You may recall that when General Wesley Clark jumped
into the race, I pledged to chuck in the Speccie if he
won. As Stephen Masty subsequently remarked on our
letters page, ‘Am I alone among Spectator readers in
sending a small donation to General Clark’s campaign?’
I hope so, Stephen. It’s against the law for non-US
citizens to contribute to a presidential campaign, and
the General’s already had a few problems with legally
dubious monies. But that’s the least of his worries.
The whole rationale of a military man stepping into
the race is that he isn’t a politician: sometimes a
general has a bluff, hearty persona like Stormin’
Norman Schwarzkopf, sometimes he has a quiet dignity
like Colin Powell. But within 48 hours General Clark
had shrivelled away into just another hack politician,
not the dashing prince, just the ninth dwarf. Mr Masty
can sell his house and give it all to the General but
it won’t make any difference.
The electoral vote adjustments arising from the 2000
census mean that, even if Bush held only the same
states as he did three years ago, he’d win by a much
bigger margin. But it won’t stop there. Right now, the
competitive states — the battleground — are the
Democratic turf. Add to that the number of big-time
Congressional Democrats who’ve decided to throw in the
towel and you’re looking at a solid Bush victory with
some key Republican gains in the Senate. The only
question is how badly the Democrats do, and that
depends on whether they allow themselves to be led
toward the wilder Chomskyan shores or can content
themselves with the artful straddle adopted by Hillary
Clinton. But the notion that this is a president in
trouble at home or abroad is ridiculous. 2004 will be
a Republican year. That’s a better bet than the Sword
of Allah in the California Muslim Football League.
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© 2003 The Spectator.co.uk
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