| A great article beyond belief. I still believe some people out there can't understand why the leading nations of the world...well...lead it in terms of social structures, human rights, economics, science, politics, government, employment, lifestyle, health, education, trade, etc.
It all comes down to one word.........(which is easy to guess).
Is it any wonder why the free world leads the free world and entire world today fending off every evil enemy over the last century that tried to overtake it. Any nation with freedom on their side will ultimately come out on top in the end.
It is the key to success and all to obvious in Iraq recently. One hopes the Arab world will take note and confront what they can't stand to bear that they know is true.
Fred Hooper
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Triumph of the free
10apr03
IN just three weeks, a badly outnumbered Western army has smashed the biggest Arab army in the world and taken control of once-fearsome Iraq.
No victory has been more complete, and few can have promised so much good.
Just over 100 allied soldiers have so far died in this war, while tens of thousands of their foe have been killed and millions of Iraqis liberated.
American soldiers are today sleeping in the golden bedrooms of Saddam Hussein's grandest palace in Baghdad. Whole divisions of Iraq's finest soldiers are sleeping in graves.
And written in the blood of this war is a moral lesson some will find as grotesque as it is true: the West has won because it is free.
In fact, that's the secret of the West's supremacy for so much of the 2500 years since the rise of the Greeks -- even the most ruthless dictatorship is little match for free men fighting a just war.
The slaughter in this war has been horrible, and I will never let myself forget the TV footage I saw of a crying boy whose arms had been blown off. Yet, sick as this may sound to "peace" activists, this war is even so a triumph of our civilisation.
A NTI-WAR commentators, such as The Age's Robert Manne, have missed the real moral when they sigh that the "deaths of so many young Iraqi men in such technologically uneven battles" is "tragic and pitiful in the extreme".
The fact that the battle is so technologically uneven is not something to be mourned. Instead, it is what we should expect and hope when a free, inquiring and self-critical democracy goes to war with a closed, dissent-murdering tyranny.
Our having better weapons comes from having better scientists. And better scientists tend to come from societies that prize knowledge, encourage debate and let people read and study what they like. Societies like ours. Like America's. Like Britain's.
And having so many of these weapons, produced so cheaply and supplied so fast, comes from having a capitalist economy, rich with the innovation, co-operation and creative competition that economic freedom breeds. It comes, too, from having the wealth that only capitalism guarantees.
All Saddam's oil can't beat our universities. All his secret police can't beat our publishers, journalists, writers and teachers. All his commissars can't beat our businessmen.
And ignore the insults of usually sage reporters that the Republican Guards defending Baghdad show "no bravery and little dignity" in throwing away their weapons and running away.
Iraqis are as brave as anyone -- in the right cause. Ask the Iraqi Kurds, who fought Saddam against terrible odds for their freedom. Ask the Shiites of the south, who in their own rebellion in 1991 suffered reprisals that killed some 30,000 of them in Basra alone.
But why should we expect them to sacrifice their lives to save that of a monster like Saddam? That's not a measure of bravery, but of stupidity or worse.
Now, fighting for freedom -- that makes heroes of even ordinary men. Throughout history, we have seen that free people fight harder in a just cause than do slaves for their masters, which is one more reason why tyrannies rarely defeat democracies.
Their soldiers fight because they must. Ours fight because they want to.
One of the great myths has been that democracies are weak in war. All that arguing. All those people demanding they be left to do what they want.
In fact, these qualities are precisely what helps to make the allied troops in this war -- and particularly our SAS soldiers -- so devastatingly effective.
THE allied commanders have told their well-trained officers to take more responsibility in deciding where to strike, and how. If they spot a weakness in the enemy, they can go for the kill, and not wait for a distant general's permission.
That's why a probe into Baghdad by a column of tanks suddenly switches to the bold capture of Saddam's palaces, when the resistance turns out to be less than expected.
That's why our SAS operates behind enemy lines, free to strike as they choose, and motivated, disciplined and united in that freedom.
In contrast, Saddam's officers have been trained to not think for themselves -- or else -- and so rarely move unless told to. In this war, many Iraqi officers have sat by, waiting for orders to come over phones whose lines have been cut.
Nor can we expect Iraq's soldiers to co-operate with each other, as our own troops do. No, not when Iraqis are forced to pledge their loyalty to Saddam, while we freely give ours to each other.
Millions of Arabs have now seen this moral lesson unfold, thanks to the war coverage of the new Arab-run al-Jazeera network.
We're told by critics of our culture -- most of them our own -- that what the Arabs and Muslims see will so enrage them that a "thousand bin Ladens" will leap up to terrorise us.
Don't believe it. It's far more likely that Saddam's humiliation will make many Arabs confront a truth that has too long been suppressed -- that their abject weakness is born of their own flawed societies.
T HE Arab world's 280 million people own most of the world's oil, yet remain pitifully poor.
They are ruled by bomb-waving dictators, ayatollahs, generals and playboy kings, yet remain impotent. Their terrorists may kill Westerners, but their armies cannot defeat them.
Just ask Israel. Four times Arab armies have joined to try to wipe out this democratic nation of just six million people, and each time they have been slaughtered.
Now Iraq, once the scourge of Iran and Kuwait, has collapsed in mere days before another Western army, half the size of its own.
Hiding from the truth is no longer possible. Many Arabs will grudgingly realise after this that only Western ways now can make them strong -- not nuclear bombs, but freedom; not conscripted soldiers, but elected politicians.
If I am right -- and for the peace of the world, let's hope so -- our soldiers have won themselves great glory.
They will have helped to liberate not only Iraq, but perhaps the Arab world.
With luck, this victory may be seen in years to come as a most wonderful triumph, not just of arms but of spirit. | |
Entertaining stuff once again Fred. Point some more of that truth at me, my sides are splitting. why don't you join us in our comby van and we'll smoke a peace pipe, man.