As long as we are on the subject....

[eisely]

I just couldn't resist posting this piece by Mark Steyn. Steyn is a Canadian writing here in the Telegraph, a British paper.

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The pundits in love with doom and gloom

By Mark Steyn

(Filed: 30/12/2003)

 

Usually in this spot each year I do an insufferable gloat-fest on the amazing accuracy of my columnar predictions from the last 12 months. But to be honest my heart's not in it this year. Although my confident assertion that Adrien Brody would win the Best Actor Oscar required a tiny modicum of prognosticatory skill, almost everything else I predicted was perfectly obvious - or, as I put it in The Spectator of March 29, "Let me go out on a limb here: the Anglo-Aussie-American forces will win." A week later, in an otherwise hilariously pessimistic issue of the Speccie, I reckoned Baghdad would fall within the next seven to 10 days. It took six.

 

But look, don't all stampede to shower me with Columnist Of The Year awards. That fall-of-Baghdad thing should have been as simple as predicting that at his next press conference Tony Blair will be wearing trousers. Might be navy, might be grey, but the trousered nature of the occasion should not be in doubt. Likewise, Baghdad. In my corner of New Hampshire in late March, if you could persuade 'em to take a five-minute break from chasing their sisters round the hayloft, guys with no teeth face down in the moonshine would tell you the Yanks would be marching down Glorious Saddam, Mighty Slayer Of The Infidel Boulevard by April 15, max. The more interesting question is why the smart fellows cranked out columns like "Baghdad Will Prove Impossible To Conquer". That would be Simon Jenkins in The Times, March 29.

 

It would be cruel to scoff at Mr Jenkins's column that day ("The coalition forces confront a city apparently determined on resistance. They should remember Napoleon in Moscow, Hitler in Stalingrad, the Russians at Grozny," etc), so let's move on to scoff at his column from four days later: "I Predict The Pundits Will Carry On Getting It Wrong", by which he meant the gung-ho neocon Zionist patsies with our predictions that Baghdad would fall within the week. Instead, Jenkins was still recommending that we "prepare for Beirut, the West Bank or Stalingrad". Our boys will be "trapped far from home and in hostile territory, like the Russians in Chechnya."

 

Oh, well. In Hollywood, purveyors of despised American culture to the world's cretins, they at least wait a decade before following Dumb And Dumber with Dumb And Dumberer. Jenkins held off barely a month before filing his own Dumb And Dumberer, in which he predicted that 2003 would go down in history as the year of "the destruction of the greatest treasure from the oldest age of Western civilisation, the greatest heritage catastrophe since the Second World War". This was a reference to the alleged destruction of the Iraqi National Museum, which yours truly said at the time was this year's "Jenin massacre" - that's to say, a complete fiction. And so it proved.

 

Seven months ago, there was so much hooey in the papers about Iraq that I decided to see for myself and had a grand time motoring round the Sunni Triangle. Lovely place, friendly people, property very reasonable. Why were my impressions so different from the doom-mongers at CNN or the New York Times? Well, it seems most media types holed up at the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad are still using their old Ba'athist minders as translators when they venture out. That would, at the very minimum, tend to give one a somewhat skewed perspective of the new Iraq.

 

But it only works because the fellows on the receiving end - the naysayers in the media and elsewhere - are so anxious to fall for it. One Saddamite pen-pusher at the museum could only peddle his non-existent sack of Baghdad to the world because, thanks to chaps like Jenkins, it was a seller's market.

 

I don't mean to harp on old Jenkins. When I see him on TV, he seems a reasonable cove with a polished air of authority. But that's precisely why his derangement is so much more alarming than the autopilot frothing of Leftie vaudeville turns like Harold Pinter and George Galloway. Jenkins is one of the great and good, he sits on quangos with big-time baronesses. But I could as easily have cited Sir Malcolm Rifkind or Sir Max Hastings, both broadly conservative types driven bonkers by their cowboyphobia.

 

"It is hard not to hate George Bush," wrote Hastings the other day. "His ignorance and conceit, his professed special relationship with God, invite revulsion. A few weeks ago, I heard a British diplomat observe sagely: `We must not demonise Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz.' Why not? The US defence secretary and his assistant have implemented coalition policy in Iraq in a fashion that makes Soviet behaviour in Afghanistan in the 1970s appear dextrous."

 

Does that sound like a Daily Telegraph editor? Former editor, I hasten to add, thank God. Wolfowitz is a demonic figure to the anti-war types for little reason other than that his name begins with a big scary animal and ends Jewishly. But, if you want to know what he's really like, ask Ann Clwyd: "He was a very charming man, an intellectual," the Welsh firebrand told the Observer. Just so. I've been in his presence on a couple of occasions - he's very soft-spoken, thoughtful, not in the least bit lupine. He can reel off the names of gazillions of Iraqis he's been in touch with for years - Kurds, Shias, Sunnis.

 

Hastings mocks these contacts as "Iraqi stooges". But better a stooge than a vast anonymous tide of native extras, which is how Sir Max, whose Rolodex doesn't appear to be brimming with Ramadi and Mosul phone numbers, sees them. Where's the real "ignorance and conceit" here? No one who knows any Iraqis, as Ms Clwyd does, would compare Wolfowitz with the Soviets.

 

The real story of this past year is not Saddam, but something deeper, symbolised by the bizarre persistence of the "anti-war" movement even after the war was over. For a significant chunk of the British establishment and for most of the governing class on the Continent, if it's a choice between an America-led West or no West at all they'll take the latter. That's the trend to watch in the year ahead.