Mohammad of Iraq The Model has some excellent thoughts about the two-year anniversary of the liberation of Baghdad and the fall of the Hussein regime. As the old saying goes, nothing succeeds like success, and the results of the liberation of Iraq have been one of the most phenomenal foreign policy successes in American history. Despite all the naysaying and the blind criticism, there have been virtually no other examples of a country going from absolute despotism to nascent democracy in two short years. The progress of Iraq — thanks to the will of the Iraqi people for democracy and freedom — has been nothing short of astounding.
Furthermore, the victory in Iraq has been the single biggest loss al-Qaeda could have ever faced. Losing Afghanistan was a setback, to be sure, but there are plenty of other places where al-Qaeda could have set up shop. Afghans aren’t Arabs, and the core of al-Qaeda’s support has always been from the Arab world — Syria, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Iraq. The key to winning the war on terror was always victory in the Levant, not the Hindu Kush.
It is only because of the way in which the democratic will of the Iraqi people was unleashed on January 30, 2005 that the Middle East has suddenly become a fertile ground for democracy. Had the Iraqi people remained under the thumb of Saddam Hussein, the democratic movements in Lebanon and Palestine would have been stillborn. Even the death of the terrorist Arafat would not have produced the same results — Saddam Hussein and others would have certainly poured millions into keeping the terrorist intifada alive and preventing peace with Israel.
The narrowminded critics of the war with their simplistic slogans and blantant monomania over President Bush could not have been more more firmly on the losing side of history. The simplistic signs of “no blood for oil” and Michael Moore’s statements equating the terrorists murdering innocent Iraqis by the dozen to Minutemen were examples of how painfully and completely out of touch the anti-war opposition was and is. The anti-war partisans were as blind to the evils of Saddam Hussein as the America First crowd was to the evils of the Third Reich. Not even the discovery of hundreds of mass graves stacked with the remains of tens of thousands of innocent men, women, and children were enough to dissuade the viscerally anti-war crowd. The argument became “why didn’t we do anything then?” — a argument that almost become valid, but only begs the question as to why there should be a statute of limitations of genocide.
Two years later, it is clear that the war in Iraq was indeed a war of liberation, and that the Iraqi people have decidedly chosen democracy over tyranny. Even the Sunnis are realizing that their best bet is in embracing the democratic process, and the difficult and often contentious process of democracy is replacing the violence of the previous regime.
For all the talk about how terrible the situation in Iraq is, the reality is that in two short years more progress has been made than I would have expected in five. The massive disconnect between the rhetoric over Iraq and the reality in the ground could not be greater. While the media talks catastrophe, the soldiers on the ground and the peope of Iraq have spent the last two years building a brighter future.
Moreover, the transformative effects of the last two years have left the Islamofascist movement under seige from all sides — the only we could win the war on terror was by systematically changing the cancerous culture that feeds terrorism. The victory in Iraq and the embrace of democratic change in Iraq has had a ripple effect through the Arab and Middle Eastern world. Democracy is expanding in Lebanon, Iran, Egypt, Kuwait, Bahrain, and even in Saudi Arabia. The genie has escaped from the bottle, and despite the attempts to stuff it back in the bottle, what is happening the Middle East is exactly what happened east of the Iron Curtain in the 1980s.
History is written by the victors, and thankfully the history of the Iraq War will be written by a free people.
