In the Wall Street Journal today, Bret Stephens writes about democracy in Iraq and America as its liberator.
"Iraqis Embrace Democracy. Do We?"
In 2002, a presidential election was held in Iraq. Saddam Hussein won it by a margin of 11,445,638 to zero. "Whether that's because they love their leader—as many people said they do—or for other reasons, was hard to tell," reported CBS News's Tom Fenton from Baghdad.
You can't say they aren't fair and balanced over at CBS.
Another election has now been held in Iraq, this time involving 19 million voters, 50,000 polling stations, 6,200 candidates, 325 parliamentary seats and 86 parties. In the run-up to the vote, the general view among Iraqis and foreign observers alike was that the outcome was "too close to call." Linger over the words: "Too close to call" has never before been part of the Arab political lexicon.
But democracy has finally arrived, first by force of American arms, next by dint of Iraqi will. It's a remarkable thing, not just in the context of the past seven years of U.S. involvement, or the eight decades of Iraq's sovereign existence, but in the much longer sweep of Arab civilization.
...[T]he insurgents murdered coalition soldiers and Iraqi civilians with equal abandon, right up to the morning of the election. Yet somehow the killing sprees (grotesquely replete with the cutting off of children's fingers) were treated by the world's great opiners not as the acts of evil men to be confronted and stopped, but purely as a function of the American presence in Iraq.
In this strange moral calculus, all the blood that was shed—including American blood—was on America's hands. It was also, by implication, a stain on America's "experiment" of "imposing" democracy on so obviously unwilling a people.
...And yet throughout all of this, Iraqis somehow held fast to their idea of a democratic country. How was that possible? How could they not behave according to type, as inveterate sectarians and anti-Americans? Didn't they perhaps miss the political clarity that dictatorship uniquely provides?
The late Michael Kelly knew the answer, and the answer was that Iraqis, unlike most of us in the West, knew tyranny, and therefore also knew what it meant to thirst for freedom. Writing just before his untimely death on the road to Baghdad, he observed:
"Tyranny truly is a horror: an immense, endlessly bloody, endlessly painful, endlessly varied, endless crime against not humanity in the abstract but a lot of humans in the flesh. It is, as Orwell wrote, a jackboot forever stomping on a human face.
"I understand why some dislike the idea, and fear the ramifications of, America as a liberator. But I do not understand why they do not see that anything is better than life with your face under the boot. And that any rescue of a people under the boot (be they Afghan, Kuwaiti or Iraqi) is something to be desired. Even if the rescue is less than perfectly realized. Even if the rescuer is a great, overmuscled, bossy, selfish oaf. Or would you, for yourself, choose the boot?"
The late Michael Kelly really nailed it.
He understood that the choice between tyranny and freedom is clear, and liberation is good.
Obama doesn't have that understanding.
On October 15, 2007, Obama visited Madison. He spoke to a crowd of 4,000 people. Although at the time it seemed as if no one could stand in Hillary Clinton's way on the road to the Dem nomination for president, Obama was plugging along on the campaign trail.
In Madison that day, he talked about Iraq. He was proud to tell the crowd that he spoke out against the war during his Illinois Senate campaign in 2002.
Obama said, "This is a dumb war, ...and we shouldn't fight it."
Not very eloquent, but that's what Obama said. He called Iraq a "dumb war" and one that we should not be fighting.
Compare that with what Michael Kelly wrote:
"Tyranny truly is a horror: an immense, endlessly bloody, endlessly painful, endlessly varied, endless crime against not humanity in the abstract but a lot of humans in the flesh. It is, as Orwell wrote, a jackboot forever stomping on a human face.
"I understand why some dislike the idea, and fear the ramifications of, America as a liberator. But I do not understand why they do not see that anything is better than life with your face under the boot. And that any rescue of a people under the boot (be they Afghan, Kuwaiti or Iraqi) is something to be desired. Even if the rescue is less than perfectly realized. Even if the rescuer is a great, overmuscled, bossy, selfish oaf. Or would you, for yourself, choose the boot?"
Would Obama, for himself, choose the boot?
Would he choose tyranny, life with his face under the boot? Is that what he'd want for his wife and children?
Would Obama want to be free and embrace democracy, or would he call the war that brought his liberation dumb?
We know that he mostly definitely did call the war in Iraq dumb; but I can't believe that would have been his assessment if the war meant that he won his freedom from the horror of tyranny.
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