Steyn: Straightening out Europe

The Genius -- oops, I meant Mark Steyn -- rips another fastball out of the park. He points to Robert Fisk's continued muddled thinking regarding America's actions in the global war on terror:

Fisk's recent column title: "They are Waiting for the Rivers of Blood"

Fisk's coverage of the Afghan war ("Bush is Walking into a Trap")

Fisk's assertion that the Americans really weren't in the Baghdad Airport... they'd instead found an RAF airfield abandoned in the Fifties

...and similar, wishful thinking on the part of the BBC, CNN, the Guardian and friends. Consistently wrong and continually braying anti-American screeds, the Euros are now chanting a new mantra: America will be consigned to the dustbin of history by China. Steyn points out that influential Europeans have been peddling this tripe since at least 1768 (e.g., dePauw and Kant).



Steyn asserts that America doesn't want to turn cities like Basra into Vegas, but wish to provide succor to those who would reject Islamofascism in favor of greater personal liberties. And, as the vote has shown, the dead-enders are definitely not in the majority.

...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. ...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. ...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...

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