A cold look at the Iraq fantasies of the left

Melanie Phillips:

...

As Britain impatiently awaits the disappearance of the Prime Minister it has impaled on the turnpike of Iraq, as it pulls troops out and as both Gordon Brown and David Cameron delicately signal that they will distance themselves from US foreign policy, John Howard’s government is increasing the number of Australian soldiers in Iraq and its ministers remain passionately committed to the battle for democracy in the Arab and Muslim world.

Their scorn for the current British mood of defeatism and appeasement is palpable. What, for example, does Foreign Minister Alexander Downer think about those in Britain who claim that the Iraq war has made the world a more dangerous place?

‘Their proposition that we should let the extremists win in Iraq and that will reduce terrorism is like saying, let Hitler take France and that will secure things a bit more. Or that if only we hadn’t taken on Hitler he wouldn’t have bombed the East End. It’s a completely fatuous proposition. For the extremists, it’s fantastic that people are saying this —because the logical conclusion is to surrender.’

What does Attorney-General Philip Ruddock think of the British government’s long-standing opposition to what it sees as America’s indefinite detention of terror suspects without a proper trial in Guantanamo Bay?

‘This shows an ignorance of the rules of war, which recognise you are entitled to hold those who engage in hostilities against you until the end of that war. It’s not a question of holding people indefinitely because generally you expect to see a war conclude.

‘This is not war as conventionally understood. It’s something worse. If people are waging war by using unconventional weapons in order to target civilian populations, you tie your hands behind your back by saying you must treat this as a normal breach of the law. We have an obligation to protect the safety and security of our populations. Law enforcement in its traditional sense does not protect our community.’

...

The Australian government understands something that many in the beleaguered administrations of both Blair and Bush (not to mention the British Tories or US Democrats) just don’t get. The Aussies grasp that the free world is under sustained attack from the same enemy on a myriad global fronts; that taking the path of appeasement on any one of these fronts is to undermine that world’s whole defence; and that it is busy undermining itself at every opportunity.

...

To a Britain which parrots the Islamists’ line that the war in Iraq is, on the contrary, the principal recruiting sergeant for terror, Downer retorts that in south-east Asia, the war in Iraq has produced a decline in support for Islamist extremism and terrorism.

...

Phillips has definitely found some soul brothers in Australia. It still remains an island of sanity in the war against the Islamist religious bigots. If the Democrats policies prevail in this country Australia's under population problem may be solved.