Mark Steyn Is A Genius, Edition VI
In Tuesday's Daily Telegraph, Steyn relieves himself in a column titled "I hate to rain on Europe's parade, but ...":The obsession of the anti-Americans misses the point: it's not about America. Surely even Fisk and the other "experts" aren't so obtuse that they can't see that the one undeniable fact of the election is that there are millions of Iraqis who want change. That doesn't mean they want to turn Basra and Kirkuk into Cleveland and Buffalo, only that they want something other than the opposing cul-de-sacs of secular pan-Arabist dictatorship and death-cult Islamism, which dead-end alternatives are all the region's had to offer for decades.Don't get him pissed off.
For want of a better expression, they'd like a "Third Way": so, just as America has New Democrats and Britain has New Labour, here come the New Shia. Ayatollah Sistani isn't like Khomeini and the other old-school mullahs, and 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.
posted by Marsh @ 3:10 AM
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