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| Britain |
| Mark Steyn: Bush will not be mocked |
| 2005-02-11 |
| Registration required On the eve of the Iraq election, the Times treated us to a riveting columnar collaboration: 'We need to fix an exit timetable, say Robin Cook, Douglas Hurd and Menzies Campbell' — in perfect harmony. To modify Churchill, defeat may be an orphan, but defeatism has many fathers, and these three were in tripartisan agreement about what a disaster Iraq had been. You'd have got a better idea of how election day was likely to proceed from that week's Speccie, which blared across its cover 'Iraq — the unreported triumph: Mark Steyn says that things are going Bush's way' — though I got the vague feeling the editors intended the headline parodically and were setting Humpty Steyny up for a helluva fall. One of the unsettling aspects of the post-9/11 world is that, while my columns in US newspapers merely have to heap scorn and derision upon Ted Kennedy, John Kerry, Michael Moore and Barbra Streisand, in the United Kingdom I find myself principally in disagreement with Lord Hurd, Sir Malcolm Rifkind, Sir Max Hastings, Sir Simon Jenkins, Sir Peregrine Worsthorne, Mr Matthew Parris and (according to what side of bed he's gotten out of) Mr Michael Howard. Even The Spectator most weeks. This crowd are all supposedly, to one degree or another, conservatives. So am I. Clearly, one of us has got the wrong end of the stick. The obvious difference between my kind of conservatives and, say, Sir Peregrine's is that mine are in power and his aren't, a distinction likely to endure for the foreseeable future. To be sure, there are prominent American conservatives who are a little queasy about Bush's plan to liberate the entire world whether it wants it or not, and several of the colossi from the first Bush administration had misgivings about the whole Iraq business from the get-go. My colleague Taki even founded a magazine for anti-war right-wingers, The American Conservative — though it seems somewhat short of either, dependent as it is on contributors Canadian (the veteran Toronto Sun doom-monger Eric Margolis) and British (our own Stuart Reid) plus a few fringe isolationist libertarians to make up the native numbers. |
| Posted by:tipper |
| #3 was too fainthearted to inculcate British ‘nation-building’ values (as in India) and South Africa, where they stayed long enough to give it its advantage over the rest of Africa. Unfortunately the Rhodesias, similarly endowed, decided to dispense with their inheritance. |
| Posted by: Cynic 2005-02-11 4:20:40 PM |
| #2 Article: Lord Hurd evidently thinks ‘nation-building’ is utopian hooey. Maybe it is. But one reason the region is in the mess it’s in is that, in 1922, fag-end British imperialism was too fainthearted to inculcate British ‘nation-building’ values (as in India) but still arrogant enough to complicate their politics, impose weak outside emirs as their kings, elevate minority groups into the ruling class — and then scram. I think the biggest mistake had nothing to do with elevating minority groups into the ruling class - it had to do with putting nationalities in single countries that had been fighting each other for thousands of years. This gave the largest groups an empire they hadn't earned, and expropriated the minority groups of the lands their ancestors had owned long before the British ever showed up. The biggest problem wasn't imperialism, where the British ruled quite competently, but the dissolution of empire, which subjected the minorities to tyranny, expropriation and slaughter. |
| Posted by: Zhang Fei 2005-02-11 11:58:46 AM |
| #1 Steyn kicks ass with size 16 steel toed wuppin' boots. |
| Posted by: ed 2005-02-11 11:42:27 AM |