Written by:MarginPressAdmin
1/16/2009 11:32 AM

I had to share this. In a snide (although wholly unbalanced) article that screams ‘I told you so’, someone called Jonathan Steele of The Guardian has claimed that the US had ‘admitted defeat’ in Iraq. ‘Defeat’ is a very strong word with military connotations; Hitler was defeated, Troy was defeated, Bismarck soundly defeated Napoleon III, etc. This might come as a surprise to the rest of us who realise that the only reason Saddam is no longer in power is because he was swept out by the US military. No doubt Saddam would have enjoyed his hanging a lot more if he known that Steele was watching those bits that matched his personal agenda and had decided that the Baghdad Butcher was really ahead on points. That Iraq is only the second Middle East democracy and that Mad Dog Gadaffi caught such a fright at what the US was doing that he voluntarily dismantled his A-bomb programme doesn’t matter apparently.

Some might say that it is really early to be reading anything permanent into it but Steele needs to get his opinion over, so…

Steele bases his argument on the fact that the US won’t be having any permanent military presence in Iraq post-2011. ‘The Iraqi resistance has everything it fought for’, he claims. I always thought they were fighting for the humiliation of the US forces in Iraq, making the country ungovernable (it has stabilised largely), introducing Sharia law and so on. When the Allies went to war in 1914 they were fighting the ‘Great War for Civilisation’, the ‘war to end all wars’, killing off Prussian nationalism and making sure that Germany would never be a threat to the continent again. Under Steele’s interpretation (which tends to confuse the personal objectives of the “neo-cons” with the military outcome), the Allies lost. No wonder we never heard from the Kaiser after he retreated into exile. He was too busy gloating and laughing at the idiots in Versailles who’d misread the scoreboard. What Steele essentially does is take the wishes of some policy makers and apply them to the whole country. Essentially, the British didn’t win World War II either since Churchill didn’t get his wish to have captured German soldiers paraded through London.

And that’s not all. You can read a whole book on this. Thank you Steele. As if the world needed another journalist as clueless as John Pilger.

TrackbackPrint

Location: BlogsFrank De Sales Blog