One-Finger Salute

Instapundit-bashing time: When is Iraq not Iraq? and other tales

Ever had to resort to picking up pennies from the sidewalk or under the couch to buy your next beer? Ever get distracted by all those shiny objects and kind of forget the point of what you were doing?

Instapundit gets stuck on a few shiny objects in the form of analyses and facts that have no bearing on his arguments - that is, when one can even be extracted from his smarmy, self-congratulatory posts:

IP approvingly posts parts of an "analysis" on why Iraqis shouldn't have a national democracy immediately:

It's right that Iraq should be run by its own people, but national politics is no place to start. It's easy to imagine an Iraq with three regional parliaments in Mosul, Baghdad and Basra, harder to foresee a single legislature filled by members of nationwide parties.

Yes...and what incentive would these "three regional parliaments" have to work with each other? If they each go their own way, why should they ever come back together to form a national "Iraqi" parliament? Isn't this another way of saying that Iraq should be broken up into three different states, based on ethnic and religious lines - an experiment that has worked wonders over in Palestine and the Indian subcontinent for the last 55 years? This scenario - which was explicitly rejected by both the US and the UK before the war - is a sure-fire recipe for instability and further conflict.

Next, InstaHistory cites this curious "historical" analogy:

Americans understand this: the original colonists learned self-government in their towns and their states and eventually applied it to an entire continent.

What the hell is he talking about? Surely Mark Steyn, the author of this piece, was referring to that blissful time when the American colonists were "learning" about democracy and "self-government" from their benevolent British imperial overlords - the same ones they fought a war against when they decided they had enough of such lessons. And perhaps my history teachers misled me, but as I recall, "colonists" lived in "colonies", not in "states". The "colonists" were no longer "colonists" by the time there were "states".

Finally, IP (if I may call him that) looks on as Steyn takes the obligatory swipe at the French:

By contrast, those European sophisticates [the French] sneering that Washington won't stay the course are often the same crowd who've found it easier to elevate the friendliest local strongman than create a durable constitutional culture.

Something that Washington has never done - certainly not in Chile, the Dominican Republic, Vietnam, the Philippines, Pakistan, Iran, or anywhere else - like Iraq itself - for that matter.

But there's much more ahistorical and anti-historical material along these lines in this article - which apparently InstaPundit thinks is "real journalism", unlike the stuff put out by his favorite whipping boys, The Guardian or the NY Times:

Steyn ponders why Jordan's "electoral politics" is "stunted and deformed". He never gets to a real answer, besides stumbling around the issue of tribalism (which certainly has been a contributing factor). Here's a clue: it is a MONARCHY. Not one of these cute, "oh-look-the-queen-is-opening-parliament" types of monarchies you find in England or The Netherlands, but a real "what-the-king-says-goes" monarchy. The "more or less benign family" that rules Jordan banned all political parties from 1957 to 1989, while the last parliamentary elections prior to those in 1989 were held in 1967. Most of the instability surrounding these moves was directly related to the founding of Israel and the expulsion of over 700,000 Palestinians from their land and the 1967 war, which Israel started. In any event, the Hashemites have always been concerned solely with staying in power (with US and often Israeli help), and certainly not with political liberalization. Perhaps Steyn, as he continues thinking about Jordan and its political trajectory, will eventually turn what is clearly a formidable intellect to these factors.

The British know more than most about nation-building, both good and bad. In the Caribbean, they created functioning states. In Africa, they failed.

As mentioned above, Steyn makes no mention of the British "nation-building" experiments in the Indian subcontinent and Palestine. How many wars resulted from those projects? How many people are still refugees because of them? And exactly what mighty, successful Caribbean states are we talking about here? Barbados and St Lucia. Hahahahahahaha. Sheer absurdity. The British don't exactly stand head-and-shoulders above the French on this score, despite Steyn's scientific analysis to the contrary.

If Saddam's prison state were to wind up like its Hashemite neighbour, we'd all be very happy.

There are certainly many Jordanians who aren't very "happy" with the Hashemite family's rule. But the benevolent imperialist, on a delightful foray into the native wilderness, rarely takes the views of the locals into consideration when making statements like "we'd all be very happy if...". Such a call - for Iraq to become the next Jordan - was something that was easy to predict.

It has to build from scratch a legal system in a part of the world that doesn't really understand the concept of the impartial judge. (President Bush has announced that Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor will be heading a forum on judicial reform in the Middle East.)

The very fact that Steyn can talk about "the concept of the impartial judge" in one sentence, and then bring up Sandra Day O'Connor - one of the Republican-appointed justices who voted along party lines to cut short the Florida recount in 2000 and thus put a Republican in the White House - in the next sentence should be enough to cause mass projectile puking across the internet. Surely, a law professor like InstaTwoFace should have found this statement amusing. Bog help the Iraqis if this is the kind of "impartial" justice they're going to get from the US. I can see the headline now: O'Connor-appointed Iraqi judge gives election to Chalabi.

The fact that InstaPundit can cite this garbage with a straight face shows clearly that "journalistic ethics" has not been a real motivating factor in his recent crusades against The Guardian and the NY Times. And, I would add, the fact that intellectuals and people in power have been taking this kind of opinion and analysis seriously is one reason why the world is fucked-up today.

Another "shiny object" post: The fact that an Iraqi national sent letters laced with toxic powders to various targets implicates the state of Iraq in "terrorist" activities...how? Christ. I hope IP's clients get better argumentation than this.