has the left gone mad?

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    Rats in the ranks

    28jul03

    WHILE Iraqis celebrate the deaths of Saddam Hussein's murderous sons, our cultural elite claim the real enemy is the US.

    IN Iraq, at least, the killing of Uday and Qusay Hussein by American soldiers last week was fantastic news.
    As you saw on TV, joyful Baghdadis fired guns into the air to celebrate the deaths of two psychopaths who, with their father Saddam, had butchered, raped, tortured, gassed and torn out the tongues of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis.

    Nuri Muhamad Rasheed, a teacher, was one of several ecstatic Iraqis quoted by the Kurdish media agency.

    "I'm an old man and I've seen a great deal of events in Iraq, from 1945 until now," he said.

    "But none of them made me so happy . . . Would you believe that so far I have brought 3kg of sweets for my neighbours' children?"

    But in Australia – in the usual warrens of "peace" activists and anti-Americans, safe from any real danger – the mood was very different. Just read letter after grim letter sent by readers to The Age and Sydney Morning Herald.

    The deaths of the Hussein brothers after a six-hour firefight was just "state sanctioned murder", spat one. It was "barbaric", cried another, "sickening," raged a third. This "should never be cause for celebration", agreed yet someone else.

    On they went. The rejoicing over the deaths of the Iraqi dictator's sons was "evil" and "abhorrent", because these killings were "wrong", a "dangerous precedent", proof of our "blood lust" and confirmation that we – the United States in particular – were just as bad as Saddam, after all.

    "It seems the US now has the right to assassinate world leaders' children," hooted someone in Sydney.

    "Just as Saddam's men killed his opponents," judged a Burnley man.

    "Please tell me how these murders differ from the acts of the terrorists we fear so much?" mourned another.

    To top it off, a couple of writers even dared to paint Uday and Qusay, whose grotesque savagery against helpless civilians is infamous, as brave men killed by Yankee cowards: "Two hundred big brave soldiers lay siege to a house with just five people in it and kill them all," jeered one.

    I have quoted at length from these letters, all taken from just one edition of each of these "serious" papers, because some people still won't believe just how widespread and extreme is this cancer of anti-Americanism – a mixture of self-loathing, envy and mortification – among our cultural elite.

    So bad is it, that forced to choose between the soldiers of the democratic US and the murderous sons of a genocidal dictator, many on the far-Left will stand with the tyrants.

    Proof: the Socialist Alternative organised a public meeting at Monash University last week to discuss the "support" of what it called the "Iraqi resistance" to the Coalition troops in Iraq.

    That means, in fact, supporting the terrorists, Muslim extremists and Saddam gunmen who are now assassinating not only the American soldiers in Iraq, but Iraqi civilians who are helping them to fix the country and install a democratic government. They'd kill our soldiers, too, if they could.

    The SA is quite clear about this. As SA spokesman Corey Oakley writes in the party's magazine, the Left has a choice in Iraq: "Whether we support the resistance to occupation, whatever its politics, or whether we support the continued occupation of the US military, the most murderous killing machine on the planet, and simply argue for it to behave better.

    "We choose the former."

    Just a few fools, you may say. Yet the SA is allowed to openly organise and meet at a public university, and at Trades Hall. Oakley has been quoted as spokesman, too, for the Refugee Action Collective, which includes church groups and unions.

    The SA also helped to organise the mayhem at the Greens-endorsed S11 protest at Crown casino, and its ranks include at least one university lecturer from Queensland, and several union activists.

    It and groups like it float, you see, in a warm bath of ideological sympathy or support from organisations that should know better, and are whipped on by a media that should be more responsible.

    I'm referring, of course, to the "elite" media both here and overseas which has tried so hard to make the liberation of Iraq seem a disaster and a giant con.

    How badly some commentators want to be proved right about those bumbling Americans, after having been proved so wrong about a war that was meant to be a "Vietnam on the Tigris". And how quickly they'll believe anything that may help them.

    So there was the hysterical reporting of the "looting" of the Baghdad Museum, which the excited Age reporter in Baghdad even said blurred "questions about where the criminality lies" in the war between Iraq and the US-led coalition.

    The story was a hoax, but the delegitimising of Iraq's liberation had begun.

    Then came the spurious claims that US President George Bush had lied when – in just 16 words in a long State of the Union speech that laid out an overwhelming case for the looming war against Saddam's regime – he noted Iraq's attempts to get uranium from Africa.

    In fact, the National Security estimate of his security agencies endorsed that essentially irrelevant claim, and Britain still does, even if one document of "evidence" has been proved a fake.

    And we were told, too, by the BBC that British Prime Minister Tony Blair's closest adviser had "sexed up" a government dossier assessing the threat from Iraq.

    Once more, the facts don't back up the conspiracy. Britain's intelligence chiefs denied any such tampering occurred, as did Blair and his adviser.

    A parliamentary inquiry cleared the Government, and now we find that the BBC's only source for the allegation, scientist Dr David Kelly, vehemently denied saying any such thing to the BBC before, overwhelmed, he killed himself.

    And always there's been the lip-licking reports of American soldiers being shot in Iraq – deaths greeted by anti-war cynics more with glee at being proved "right" about this "quagmire", than with respect for the tragic price the US is paying for the liberation of Iraq and the peace of us all. No wonder impressionable radicals barrack for these soldiers' killers.

    But here's the bigger and brighter picture being missed in this savage search for aha! righteousness. Look at Iraq. The schools are open, and the torture chambers closed. It is now selling up to a million barrels of oil a day, and receiving medicines.

    Most towns and cities are now run by local councils, cleansed of Saddam's cronies, and police are being trained and deployed. More than 100 newspapers have opened in an excited babble of freedom.

    A crude survey of Iraqis by Britain's YouGov pollsters even found most Iraqis it asked supported the American liberation of their country and did not want the US troops to leave soon.

    Better still, two weeks ago 25 Iraqi men and women – even Shiite clergy we were told would never co-operate – were appointed by the US to a new Iraqi Governing Council. These are the people now working to create not just a new administration, but the first democratic government in Iraq's tortured history.

    Take a wider view still. Iraq is no longer a threat, and Syria no longer quite so blatant in supporting terrorists. Iran's ayatollahs are struggling to explain to their restless people why they can't be free, too.

    And how about this: The main Palestinian terrorist groups – oh, wonders – have suddenly decided that a ceasefire with Israel is smarter than blowing up busloads of children, and a real peace settlement has now never seemed closer.

    Even in Saudi Arabia, the tightly muzzled newspapers are at last asking whether it isn't time for a little less extremism and a lot more freedom. Feel that buzz.

    This is one of those rare and exciting times, when good may flourish in a region that's known too much evil, and when a chained people are being released into freedom. With our help.

    Things may yet go bad in Iraq, of course. There will be mistakes and setbacks. More people yet will die, although fewer than in any average week of Saddam's bloody "peace".

    But at least last week brought an end to one of the fears that threatened Iraq's emergence from the dungeons into sunshine – the fear of so many Iraqis that Saddam and his sadistic sons may one day return.

    Celebrate the day, the year and the times. And celebrate, too, those who have most made all this possible – the men and women of the United States military, who last week struck yet another blow for freedom against the monsters who would steal it. Celebrate. Don't mourn.

    andrew bolt-herald sun
 
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