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Monday, January 05, 2004

Steyn!

We are, of course, huge fans of Mark Steyn. He is not only conservative and smart (those two so often go hand-in-hand, don't they?), he's pretty dang funny. Here are some bits from his latest:

'I feel extremely humiliated,' agreed the Egyptian writer Sayyid Nassar. 'By shaving his beard, a symbol of virility in Iraq and in the Arab world, the Americans committed an act that symbolises humiliation in our region.'

You should feel humiliated. It is humiliating when you invest your pride in a total loser. You know what would humiliate me if I were a hotshot Egyptian intellectual like Mr Nassar? The Americans democratising Iraq before the Egyptians manage to democratise Egypt.

More:
Why exactly did Colonel Gaddafi, within a week of Saddam's capture, throw open the gates of his WMD facilities to the Brits and Yanks? 'I will do whatever the Americans want,' said the Colonel, 'because I saw what happened in Iraq, and I was afraid.'

Or as I put it in the Jerusalem Post in early May, 'You don't invade Iraq in order to invade everywhere else, you invade Iraq so you don't have to invade everywhere else.'

And:
The delay between the fall of the Taleban and the fall of Saddam was a little too long: there should be an informal target of one tinpot thug per year, to be removed by whatever means are to hand.

This is news to me:
It turns out, despite the sneers of the bien pensants, that the axis of evil is not just a rhetorical flourish but a real live working axis. One reason why the scale of its advances was not known to the IAEA dupes is that Iran, North Korea, Libya and others were able to farm out different elements of the programme to different countries, thereby ensuring that it's only when you know the network that you can see the full picture. Nonetheless, we now understand that pre-Musharraf Pakistan and communist North Korea were at the centre of a huge conspiracy to nuclearise the Arab world.

God Bless The Coalition of the Willing
On the Sunday morning of Saddam's capture the President called the Prime Ministers of Britain, Australia, Spain, Italy and Poland. The Canadians had to wait for a brief conversation on the Monday, and the French, Germans and Russians had to make do with James Baker. ... Orrin Judd, who describes Britain's and America's interventions with Libya, Syria et al. as a classic good cop/bad cop routine: the urbane Foreign Office wallah flies in and explains nice and friendly-like that you really don't want to meet his Texan partner.

posted by Gary at 14:09 | [Permalink] (0) comments

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