I hate to rain on Europe's parade, but …

Oh, go ahead, Mark, rain all over them! Mark Steyn takes a look at the radid, anti-Americans rants and raves over the Iraqi elections, as only he can. - Sailor

I hate to rain on Europe's parade, but …
By Mark Steyn
Opinion.telegraph
(Filed: 08/02/2005)

I was very moved by the story of Mr Richard Kral, a Slovak gentleman found staggering drunk down a snowy trail a few days back. He'd been motoring through the Tatra Mountains in his Audi when he got buried by an avalanche. Opening the window and frantically clawing at the snow, he grasped that he couldn't dig his way out faster than the white stuff would come into the car and bury him. So he looked around and his eye fell on the 60 half-litre bottles of beer he happened to have with him. He had a drink and midway through realised that he could urinate on the snow to melt it.


And he did: "Man Peed Way out of Avalanche," as one headline put it. "It was hard," the plucky Slovak told the local press, "and now my kidneys and liver hurt."

I read that item on January 29. The next day Iraq voted and, scanning the coverage from Toronto to Sydney via Dublin, London, Paris and Berlin, I had an eerie sense of déjà vu. The Western media appear to have decided that any good news out of Iraq is one almighty neocon snow job and the only thing to do is emulate Mr Kral and urinate all over it.

Alas, they've got a much tougher job. The snow is still coming down, and they've got nothing in the back of the car except the same watery beer they've been chugging for three years: "They Are Waiting for the Rivers of Blood," proclaimed the headline over Robert Fisk's column in the Independent, another classic for fans of the beloved comic genius to cut out and add to treasured clippings - such as his coverage of the Afghan war ("Bush Is Walking into a Trap") and his confident assertion that there were no Americans at Baghdad airport and that the blundering Yanks had merely stumbled upon an abandoned RAF airfield from the 1950s.

As it transpired, the only folks waiting for the rivers of blood were Fisky, the BBC, CNN and the rest of the gang, and they'll be waiting a long time. So long that, in the Guardian, Martin Jacques has moved on to penning orgasmic fantasies of the mid-century when China will bestride the world and America will be consigned to the garbage heap of history.

Jacques's reasoning - the Chinese are an "ancient civilisation" whereas America is a mere "settler society" - is merely a modish gloss on the traditional argument made by the Germans for the better part of two centuries, that they're an ancient volk while the Americans are an artificial uncultured mongrel "half-degenerated sub-race" (Kant in 1775).

Cornelius de Pauw, court philosopher to Frederick II, was peddling the Jacques line in 1768: Americans were "stunted" and their colonies "degenerate or monstrous"; and "in a fight, the weakest European could crush them with ease". Granted the general retro vibe that hangs over Europe these days, it smacks of desperation to have modified de Pauw's line only insofar as claims to crush America's stunted degenerates with ease are no longer made on your own behalf, but that of Johnny Chinaman 50 years hence.

The obsession of the anti-Americans misses the point: it's not about America. Surely even Fisk and the other "experts" aren't so obtuse that they can't see that the one undeniable fact of the election is that there are millions of Iraqis who want change. That doesn't mean they want to turn Basra and Kirkuk into Cleveland and Buffalo, only that they want something other than the opposing cul-de-sacs of secular pan-Arabist dictatorship and death-cult Islamism, which dead-end alternatives are all the region's had to offer for decades.

For want of a better expression, they'd like a "Third Way": so, just as America has New Democrats and Britain has New Labour, here come the New Shia. Ayatollah Sistani isn't like Khomeini and the other old-school mullahs, and the emergence of a moderate pluralist Shia-led federation in Iraq will be as devastating to the Teheran regime's long-term prospects as any Israeli-American strike on their nuke facilities. As the Arab networks' election-day coverage instinctively grasped, the American angle to this story will be increasingly peripheral.

Now I take the point that "democracy" - as in elections - isn't every thing. In the development of successful nations, the universal franchise is usually the last piece of the puzzle, as it was in Britain. Anyone can hold an election: Mugabe did; so did Charles Taylor, the recently retired Psycho-for-Life of Liberia. The world's thugocracies have got rather skilled at being just democratic enough to pass muster with Jimmy Carter and the international observers: they kill a ton of people, put it on hold for six weeks and then, when the UN monitors have moved on, pick up their machetes and resume business as usual.

I prefer to speak of "liberty" or, as Bush says, "freedom", or, as neither of us is quite bold enough to put it, capitalism - free market, property rights, law of contract, etc. That's why Hong Kong is freer than Liberia, if less "democratic". If I had six or seven centuries to work on things, I wouldn't do it this way in Iraq or Afghanistan. But the "war on terror" is more accurately a race against time - to unwreck the Middle East before its toxins wreck South Asia, West Africa, and eventually Europe. The doom-mongers can mock Bush all they want. But they're spending so much time doing so, they've left themselves woefully uninformed on some of the fascinating subtleties of Iraqi and Afghan politics that his Administration turns out to have been rather canny about.

Will the naysayers continue forcing their ever more strained dribble of urine over the Bush landscape? Well, the Parisian journalist Frederic Royer has just launched a new weekly tabloid called L'Anti-Americain. The first issue includes a parodic diary by George W Bush with the entry: "Ask the CIA: Where's China?"

Hilarious! Bush is so dumb he can't even find the real 21st-century superpower on a map! As it happens, it was the Canadian prime minister, a renowned sophisticate and indeed a fluent franco-phone, who last year declared in public that China was the most important nation in the southern hemisphere.

If that 1999 New Hampshire primary-season gag is the highlight of M Royer's first issue, it seems to me that Europe's vast anti-American pissoir is coming down with a bad case of intellectual cystitis.