The reality of Shi’ite Basra—i.e., the reality of 60 percent of Iraq

In the last six months, writes Marie Colvin in the London Times, 48 women have been murdered in Basra for “un-Islamic behaviour.”

(Repeat after me: The Shi’ites are the good Iraqi majority, whom we are rescuing from the bad Iraqis and the bad al Qaeda.)

The real power in Basra, Colvin reports, is the Shi’ite militias, not the police.

She writes:

The objective of the UK forces in southern Iraq was to establish the security needed for political development and economic reconstruction. Major-General Graham Binns, the commander of British forces in Basra province, acknowledged that “we were unable to meet the aspirations of the Iraqi people.”

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Indian living in the West, who sent the piece to me, writes:

Reading all this as a foreigner to American politics, I think Bush is probably the greatest disaster in American history.

Like the opposite of a Midas, almost everything he touches turns to dust. The great American economic expansion that has supposedly occurred under Bush was built on cheap money from the Fed and the chickens are truly coming home to roost now after the sub-prime debacle. The U.S. Dollar has lost more than 80 percent of its value against the Euro since 2001.

Bush inherited a budget surplus and turned it into a massive deficit with his free spending ways. All this while he had a Republican congress for the most part. And the U.S. trade deficit is now large enough to threaten the entire global economic system. The Arabs now want to junk the dollar and sell their oil in some other currency.

On immigration, he has been an utter disaster as we have discussed many times.

And in foreign policy, it has been another total disaster. Could the mission to turn Iraq into the democratic flower of the Middle East have gone this badly wrong?

In some ways I would envy Bush’s successor. You can’t possibly do worse than this!

Lazar writes:

What struck me most was not the barbarism that ensues wherever the Western soldier packs it in, but the perfect formulation of liberalism’s self-sacrificial Other-worship offered by the British commander: “We were unable to meet the aspirations of the Iraqi people.” This is the mindset that made it all happen. He might just as well have said “We did not propitiate the sun-god with our sacrifices.” Clearly religious.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at December 16, 2007 03:16 PM | Send