THE HORSE RACE:

Don't let Iraq's tempest in a teacup rattle you (Mark Steyn, April 11, 2004, Chicago Sun-Times)

The Iraqi people don't want to be on the American side, only on the winning side. Right now, those two positions happen to coincide; 99.99 percent of Iraqi Shiites aren't involved in the troubles of the last week. This guy Sadr is a junior-league blowhard. ''If they come for our leader,'' says one of his commanders, ''they will ignite all of Iraq." No, they won't. The vast majority of Iraq will remain un-ignited.

Look at those pictures of the atrocity in Fallujah: the remains of four corpses, and a bunch of savages dancing around them. In all those photographs, can you add up more than a hundred men? And half of them are punk kids under 11. There are 300,000 people in that city. A few score are depraved enough to cheer on the killers of four brave men; 299,900 of the town's population were either disapproving or indifferent.

And in the Arab world, the indifferent are the biggest demographic. They sit things out, they see which strong horse has jostled his way to the head of the pack, and they go along with him.

One interesting question is whether it might not be in the best interests of ourselves and the Iraqis to stage manage a scenario in which Ayatollah Ali Sistani gets us to leave before June 30 so that he appears the strong horse and gets the populace even more firmly behind his vision of the next Iraq.

Posted by Orrin Judd at April 10, 2004 12:18 PM