Jealous Australian Moonbat

Apparently the last flock of American hating Aussies was only a vanguard for Owen Harries' article in the Sydney Morning Herald:

[W]e are on the verge of witnessing another such [Vietnam] defeat. In terms of its declared objective - the creation of a democratic Iraq - the war in that country is doomed to fail. The conditions for such a democracy simply do not exist and cannot be created any time soon. But I have now come to believe that there is a good chance that failure will be more than compensated for by the restoration of sanity to American foreign policy. I say this as someone who has, from the outset, opposed this war as a misbegotten venture, wrongly conceived as well as incompetently implemented.

The outcome of the Iraq war will be a defeat whose good consequences will outweigh its bad ones because it will destroy illusions of omnipotence and restore a sense of limits, restraint and balance to American foreign policy - and that is essential for world order.

At the beginning of this decade such a sense was already extremely attenuated. The combination of victory in the Cold War, enormous military superiority and a huge economic surge in the 1990s seemed to indicate that whatever the indispensable nation willed was achievable. The only real restraint on America was America itself.

That restraint was effectively removed by the combination of a new president, who believed he had direct access to God, an ideologically motivated national security set-up, and the trauma of September 11, 2001. In solemn words, the US Government dedicated itself to re-creating the political world in its own image. The ignorant and the semi-sophisticated agreed that this was merely rhetoric. But it was said in deadly earnest: America intended to be a revolutionary power, and was prepared to pursue its revolutionary ends unilaterally if necessary.

Against that background, and to adapt a phrase familiar to Australian politics, perhaps Iraq has been the failure that the US had to have.

Harries exposes at least three odious points:

1. Violence preferred: Harries' isn't promoting peace--he's welcoming war, one ending (after who knows how many casualties) with America's defeat. Aren't lefties supposed to be anti-war? Bad on ya, mate.



2. See no evil. Leftists used to foment class struggle; Marxists prophesied the impetus would emerge from the true leaders of society--the "lower classes." Well, elite think tank-types such Harries' have canceled the revolution. Worse, Owen's argument believes that Middle East and North African Arabs are too immature for democracy and freedom. So they've no interested in improving the lives of others in the lesser developed countries. Accoding to the left, no number of Iraqi lives were worth American blood or treasure.



3. America's not a force for good. Nonsense. American interventions overwhelmingly have been well-received and rated as a success, says NRO's Victor Davis Hanson:

   Imagine a world in which there was no United States during the last 15 years. Iraq, Iran, and Libya would now have nukes. Afghanistan would remain a seventh-century Islamic terrorist haven sending out the minions of Zarqawi and Bin Laden worldwide. The lieutenants of Noriega, Milosevic, Mullah Omar, Saddam, and Moammar Khaddafi would no doubt be adjudicating human rights at the United Nations. The Ortega Brothers and Fidel Castro, not democracy, would be the exemplars of Latin America. Bosnia and Kosovo would be national graveyards like Pol Pot's Cambodia. Add in Kurdistan as well — the periodic laboratory for Saddam's latest varieties of gas. Saddam himself, of course, would have statues throughout the Gulf attesting to his control of half the world's oil reservoirs. Europeans would be in two-day mourning that their arms sales to Arab monstrocracies ensured a second holocaust. North Korea would be shooting missiles over Tokyo from its new bases around Seoul and Pusan. For their own survival, Germany, Taiwan, and Japan would all now be nuclear. Americans know all that — and yet they grasp that their own vigilance and military sacrifices have earned them spite rather than gratitude. And they are ever so slowly learning not to much care anymore.

Though I doubt Harries sees it, his tirade against America is more closely related to his inadequacies than a (non-existent) unfairness. That's when resentment transforms to anger.