WOBBLIES

Cursed are the peaceniks (James Delingpole, The Spectator, May 22nd, 2004)

Every now and then, there’ll come along a story which has the anti-war lobby punching the air with glee and which gives even pro-war people like me pause for thought. First was the one about the looting of Baghdad Museum’s greatest treasures (until it was inconveniently discovered to be tosh); more recently we’ve had the great Shia rebellion (that never was, because most Shiites think al-Sadr’s a prat); followed by Abu Ghraib, which I concede has a stronger foundation than most, is a spectacular own goal, a violation of human rights and so on, but which I still think is blinding rather too many journalists to the bigger picture, so busy as they are trying to explain why it is that being photographed naked with a female prison guard is every bit as appalling an ordeal as, say, being decapitated with a knife or blown to pieces by a suicide bomber.

Here’s a thing that puzzles me. Before the Iraq war started, I remember trawling through dozens and dozens of learned articles which all pointed out that however difficult the invasion might prove, the post-war settlement in a country with so many different tribal and religious factions and no recent tradition of democracy would be trickier. Yet now we’re at that tricky post-war settlement stage, everyone’s suddenly acting as though Iraq’s more like Tunbridge Wells and our failure to create instant harmony among such a pliant, peaceable population is an international disgrace.

I believe the Iraq invasion was the right thing to do for the same reasons I always did. The discovery of WMDs would have been a bonus, but they were never the real issue. Nor —— being grotesquely realpolitik-ish about this —— was the freedom of the Iraqis, absolutely delighted though I am that they’ve been rescued from decades of suffering and torture far worse than anything the Americans have ever inflicted.

Rather, the Iraqi invasion happened and ought to have happened because it is part of a long, ambitious but very necessary campaign to tip a wavering Islamic world towards stable, capitalist, peaceful, liberal democracy. If there’s one thing the West ought to have learnt from the escalation of terrorist atrocities in the last decade -- from the tourist massacre in Luxor through to 9/11 and Madrid -- it’s that its policy of appeasement towards Islamic terrorists and the regimes which fund or harbour them hasn’t worked. The growth of Islamofascism needs to be acknowledged for the global menace it is and confronted at any and every opportunity. To pull out of Iraq now at its greatest hour of need would not only make a nonsense of the invasion’s supposed humanitarian claims, but also act as a spur to terrorists who are never stronger than when the West is divided and weak.

The pacification of the Middle East is not going to be quick, easy or pretty. No one ever said it would be. But to those pea-brained, isolationist chicken-lickens of the media who ask what it all has to do with us, here’s a very simple explanation. It’s to lessen ever so slightly the chance that the next time you or I get on to a bus, a train or an aeroplane, the very last words we ever hear are a bearded but otherwise ritually shaved man in a headband yelling, ‘‘Allahu akbar.’’

That the left has seized on the Abu Ghraib scandal is hardly surprising. Most of them are like the pacifist “objective fascists” described by Orwell. One can even understand why a lot of ordinary, decent folks are upset and confused. But what explains the defection and lost bearings of so many apparently hard-nosed, resolute intellectual supporters over a matter that wouldn’t merit a footnote in the annals of the cruelties of war?