Irak

[Merowig]

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Fighting terror

By Diana West
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
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And a murderously difficult step it is, as the horrific killings and mutilation in Fallujah this week remind us. But imagine a war on terror that left Saddam Hussein unscathed, not to mention Uday and Qusay, even as the Ba'athist regime continued to flout the international community, shelter al Qaeda offshoots and renegades, run its torture chambers and rape rooms,
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Without bothering to speculate what measures Ba'athist Iraq might have taken by now, consider the boons to world peace that would not have occurred without its defeat.
1) Rogue-state Libya would not have voluntarily surrendered its weapons of mass destruction program and applied for membership in the community of nations. In an interview last year with the British Spectator, Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi said Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi told him, "I will do whatever the Americans want, because I saw what happened in Iraq and was afraid."
2) Pakistan's secret role in passing nuclear secrets to such rogue states as Libya, Iran and North Korea would not have been exposed. As editor at large of The Washington Times, Arnaud de Borchgrave, has reported, "Suddenly, Col. Qaddafi, suitably impressed by U.S. military capabilities in Iraq, had no compunction about leaking secrets that led to a Pakistani and Iranian connection."
3) Syria would not be showing signs of wanting to come in from the cold. "Syria has appealed to Australia to use its close ties with Washington to help the Arab nation shake off its reputation as a terrorist haven," reports The Australian newspaper. That, of course, will require a whole lot of shaking, but any such movement is noteworthy. "The overtures by Syria," the paper writes, "are seen as a response to the West's determination to confront rogue nations that may either pose a threat themselves or pass on weapons to terrorists."
4) And, of course, there would not be a shiny, new, hard-won interim constitution in Iraq that promises to allow democracy to take root.
Will freedom spread to Iraq's authoritarian neighbors? The recent collapse of an Arab summit on the subject has made me strangely hopeful. Organized as a response to the Bush administration's call for Middle Eastern reform, the summit was canceled by host-country Tunisia because unnamed countries failed to support calls for "tolerance,""understanding"or "democracy" in a summit statement. That there was no such consensus is unfortunate; that there was even such a debate is promising.
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Wahrlich das Tor zur Hölle hat Bush aufgerissen *gg*
Vielleicht auch die groesste Umwaelzung in der Region seit langem - udn das was ich seh ist doch recht positiv
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