Throwing the baby out with the Baath Water.
What do you call someone who sets out to prove one thing and usually succeeds in proving the opposite? Over at Armchair Angst (http://james.butler.name/weblog/blogger.html), fellow poker-playing blogger James Butler talks of `making sense of a senseless world', yet more frequently succeeds only in expressing his inability to make sense of things that make perfect sense to most people.

A recurrent theme is his very own brand of Anti-Americanism. Not for him the burning of the US flag or wearing a Bush face mask while standing on stilts in a protest march. No, instead he writes of the country as an empire sure to fall, spreading a decadent anti-culture to the rest of the world, which we absorb at our peril. In his article of November 23, he appears to suggest that he emigrated from Britain to Ireland to get away from people using American terminology in day-to-day parlance. Way to go, Jim-boy!

James despairs of the popularity of American culture and can't seem to grasp why it's accepted so readily. The answer, which I understood when I was about 7 years old, is that Americans look like they are having more fun. As a child I couldn't understand for the life of me why anyone would want to watch Coronation Street when there was the Six Million Dollar Man. Why voluntarily depress yourself?

Every visit I have undertaken to the US has underlined this. The people there are far more cheery and seem to want to enjoy life without any of the existential weltschmerz that so many people on this side of the Atlantic seem to think is necessary to affect in order to be taken seriously. Miserable Europeans should take heed of what I saw the hostess of an Indian music channel tell her viewers: "You only live once!" (thereby rejecting thousands of years of her culture's belief in re-incarnation).

Now Damn the man, he's only gone and outlined the reasons for his mixed views on the US while I'm half-way through writing this! Oh well, I shall press on and cover another point he makes. Elsewhere, also on November 23, he asks:

Should the troops return from Iraq now? Yes, they should. The job is done. Saddam is no longer a threat to Iraq and Iraq is no longer a threat to the rest of the region. The foreign troops are only there through altruism now and it is getting them nowhere. More troops have been lost since the Iraqi army was defeated than during the war. The country is in chaos as the various factions fight each other and the fundamentalists target foreign soldiers. We can safely leave the country and let it get on with destroying itself. If it becomes a threat to the region in the future then we just bomb it back to the stone age again. Sorry to speak out in a non-Liberal way but if the Iraqis are not interested in our way of life then that is ok.

Since he has taken the trouble to explain some of the assumptions in his view, I can respond to them. Firstly he seems to take it as a given that the fact that more troops have been killed since the end of the defeat of the army than were killed in the war, is somehow a meaningful criticism. I'm not sure why the latter figure is taken as the denominator though. It's a small number compared to the numbers killed in the sort of terrorist outrages that the whole neo-con project is designed to prevent happening in the future. Two hundred Africans were killed in the two embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998. Roughly three thousand were killed in the attacks on the World Trade Centre in 2001. And note that it was the World Trade Centre, not an `American Trade Centre' that was destroyed. A very large number of non-Americans were killed that day, including people from Muslim countries like Pakistan.

A lot of people assume that the WTC was filled with Wall Street Types - the `masters of the Universe' bond traders and such wheelers and dealers. In fact the buildings were mostly filled with small companies - branches of Taiwanese banks and lots of little freight forwarding and import-export companies. It was an attack on all of us.

James also states that Iraq is in a state of chaos. This just isn't true. Most of the attacks happen in the so-called `Sunni Triangle' and it's not surprising that this is so. The war shattered the master-slave relationship within the country and that area contains a large concentration of former masters. Their reaction to the arrival of US troops is not indicative of a cross section of national opinion.

The fundamentalists who are attacking soldiers in Iraq would merely switch to attacking civilians in Europe, Israel or the US if the troops left. As things stand, they are attacking armed professional soldiers instead. What price would any bookmaker has given on September 12th 2001 that after two years there would not have been another major terrorist attack on US soil? Twenty to one? Forty? I don't know, but it's likely to have been in double figures, that's for sure.

The wider benefit of the entire war would be missed if we were to abandon it now. The whole idea is to create one successful Arab capitalist democracy in a country that borders Iran, Saudi Arabia and Syria. Something needs to be in place before the Saudi Royal family loses control. The Saudi youth, who are the region's other Weapon of Mass Destruction need to see an alternative to the theocratic madness of Iran, the death-cult hell of the Palestinian West bank and the despotism of Syria and the former Iraqi regime.

And the worst thing possible would be for us to do as James suggests and leave the country to the Arab world to sort out. That's like letting the school bullies take charge of the sick bay. The whole point of the undertaking is to shatter the status quo,thus giving hope to the masses, so that they are not drawn to the madness of al-Qaeda or the Baath party.

Let's see it through for the benefit of all our futures.