Propaganda - Fälscht die US-Armee Leserbriefe an Zeitungen? - 500 Beiträge pro Seite

[DmComeBack]

US-FELDPOST

Im Namen der Propaganda

Von Ulrike Putz

Die Heimat soll erfahren, dass es gar nicht so schlimm ist im Irak. Dachten sich Öffentlichkeitsarbeiter der amerikanischen Armee und leiteten hymnische Briefe von Irak-stationierten US-Soldaten an Zeitungen weiter. Kleiner Schönheitsfehler: Die angeblichen Verfasser haben die Briefe nie geschrieben.


AP

Graffitto in Kirkuk: Dank an die Amerikaner


Berlin - Vater Deaconson aus West Virginia war verwirrt: Da druckt das Lokalblatt einen vor Pathos triefenden Brief seines im Irak stationierten Sohns Nick ab, und als der stolze Vater ihn dazu beglückwünschen will, weiß er nichts von dem Schreiben. "Als ich ihm am Telefon gesagt habe, dass der Brief sehr gut gewesen sei, fragte er nur: ,Welcher Brief`?", sagte Deaconson der Zeitung "USA Today".
Was ist das für ein Brief, unter dem mein Name steht - und woher kommt er? Das fragen sich in diesen Tagen mehrere amerikanische Soldaten im Irak. Die Angehörigen des 503. Airborne Infantry Regiments, das seit Monaten in Kirkuk stationiert ist, firmieren als Verfasser eines immer gleichen Schreibens, das im vergangenen Monat im Posteingang von mindestens elf Zeitungen zwischen Massachusetts und Kalifornien gelandet ist.

Die wortgleichen Briefe mit jeweils anderer Unterschrift preisen in fünf Absätzen die Sinnhaftigkeit des amerikanischen Irak-Einsatzes. Die Phantom-Autoren loben den verbesserten Lebensstandard in der nordirakischen Stadt, die ihnen "eine Heimat fern der Heimat" geworden sei:


AP

Einsatzort Nordirak: Immer neue Angriffe zermürben die Soldaten


"Die Mehrheit der Bevölkerung hat uns mit offenen Armen begrüßt. Obwohl wir schon fünf Monate hier sind, kommen die Leute bei über 40 Grad Hitze aus ihren Häusern gelaufen, wenn wir auf Patrouille vorbeifahren. Kinder laufen lachend auf uns zu, um uns die Hände zu schütteln. Sie rufen uns in gebrochenem Englisch ,Thank You, Mister` zu."

Soweit die frohe Feldpost-Botschaft, die von verschiedenen amerikanischen Zeitungen abgedruckt wurde. Bis sich herausstellte, dass es sich bei dem Schreiben unbekannter Herkunft um einen Formbrief handelt. Nachfragen von amerikanischen Medien ergaben: Einige Soldaten durften das Schreiben, das von einem Offizier in Kirkuk ausgeteilt worden sein soll, immerhin lesen, bevor sie unterschreiben sollten. Andere wurden gar nicht erst gefragt, in mindestens zwei Fällen wurde der Name ohne Wissen der Soldaten auf den Vordruck gesetzt. Cowboy Demokratie!

Der Offizier soll die Ausbeute nach Texas weitergeleitet haben, berichten amerikanische Medien. Dort sitzt das "Hometown News Release Program". Die armeeigene Propagandastelle kümmert sich darum, dass Lokalzeitungen mit immer neuen Geschichten über Soldaten, die aus der Region stammen, versorgt werden. Nur waren die verbreiteten Neuigkeiten in diesem Fall nicht die authentischen Erlebnisse einzelner. Die Briefe scheinen Teil einer Kampagne, mit der die zunehmenden Sorgen in der Öffentlichkeit über den verlustreichen Irak-Einsatz zerstreut werden soll.

Misstrauisch geworden ob der immer gleich lautenden Befindlichkeits-Beschreibungen waren amerikanische Journalisten im Irak. Sie mochten nicht glauben, dass die Soldaten urplötzlich ein einstimmiges Jubellied auf ihren Job anstimmen. Auch wenn die Menschen in den irakischen Kurdengebieten den Amerikanern durchaus gewogener sind als im dauerkriselnden Süden: Viele GIs sind zermürbt durch Überfälle und das lange Warten auf das immer wieder hinausgezögerte Ende ihres Einsatzes.

Die Armee versucht sich nun in Schadensbegrenzung und gibt an, nicht zu wissen, wer für den Werbefeldzug per Post verantwortlich zeichnet. Die Zentrale habe von all dem nichts gewusst, da habe jemand weiter unten eine ganz dumme Idee gehabt. Wer, bleibt ungeklärt. "Irgendjemand, irgendwo hat es auf sich genommen, die Briefe zu verschicken", wich ein Militärsprecher einer Anfrage der "USA Today" aus. Kein Soldat sei unter Druck gesetzt worden, den Brief zu unterschreiben, beteuert ein anderer Armeesprecher. Dass "Home Town News Release Program" sei missbraucht worden. Doch das Misstrauen ist gesät: Wenn die schon Leserbriefe fälschen, was dann noch alles, fragen sich amerikanische Zeitungen und Fernsehsender.

Die öffentliche Meinung in der Vereinigten Staaten kippt. Die Amerikaner, noch im Frühjahr davon überzeugt, mit ihrer Armee im Irak zum rechten Zeitpunkt am richtigen Ort zu sein, fragen sich zunehmend, warum sie viel Personal und noch mehr Geld in das ferne Zweistromland schicken sollen. Nach einer Umfrage von "USA Today" glauben nur noch 50 Prozent der Bevölkerung, dass der Krieg gerechtfertigt war. Im April waren es noch 73 Prozent.

Dem amerikanischen Militär ist der Vorfall auch deshalb so hochnotpeinlich, weil er die von der Regierung vergangene Woche angestoßene Medien-Kampagne ins Zwielicht setzt. Mit ihr will Präsident Bush den negativen "Filter" beseitigen, der sich seiner Ansicht nach über die Irak-Berichterstattung gelegt hat. Dazu will er, wie er Montag verkündete, seinem Wahlvolk erzählen, was diesem sonst anscheinend öfter vorenthalten wird: "Die Wahrheit."

http://www.spiegel.de/politik/ausland/0,1518,269954,00.html

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Ich hoffe das "Fußvolk" bekommt jetzt auch entlich mit, was hier gespielt wird.
Der Regierung um Bush traue ich alles zu. Wenn der im nächsten Jahre schlechte Karten für seine Wiederwahl sieht, dann Kracht es irgendwo auf der Welt.

Gruß
DmComeBack

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für Bekenner!

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[regierungswechsel]

Hallo DMcomeback,

mal eine rethorische Frage: Macht Wasser naß?


Das wird schon seit Byzanz so gemacht.


Servus
der
Regierungswechsel

[DmComeBack]

Ist je egal - jetzt klaut sich das Pack "sein Geld" zusammen.

Jetzt kommt es wie immer- die Amis "nehmen" sich was ihnen "gehört".


Vier Milliarden Öl-Dollar in Irak verschwunden


Vier Milliarden Dollar aus Ölverkäufen sind in Irak in dunklen Kanälen verschwunden. Wie die Organisation Christian Aid am Rande der Irak-Geberkonferenz in Madrid mitteilte, verschwand das Geld auf von den USA kontrollierten „undurchsichtigen Bankkonten“ der Zivilverwaltung. „Die Organisation mit Sitz in London warnte, das „schwarze Finanzloch“ nähre den ernsthaften Verdacht, dass zum Wohle von US-Unternehmen :unverhältnismäßig hohe Summen an Bargeld abgezweigt würden, obwohl mit dem Geld eigentlich die massive Arbeitslosigkeit und andere Probleme in Irak eingedämmt werden sollten.

Quelle: bild.de - News-Ticker!!!!!!!

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Das war doch zu erwarten, dass die Amis das Geld aus dem Oelgeschäft - Richtung USA leiten.

[mouse_potato]

verkauft!

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[DmComeBack]

@ mouse

tolle Sache. Für diesen Preis unschlagbar.

Anziehen könnte ich es nicht. Aber bevor ich eines von Bush anziehen würde, dann ganz ehrlich lieber das von Saddam.

Gruß
DmComeBack

[mouse_potato]

das von bush ist aber besser:

[spicault]

Der Spiegel-Artikel ist ein Propaganda-Stück, das typisch für diese Zeitschrift und die deutschen Medien - und nicht nur die deutschen Medien - im Allgemeinen ist. Hier wird ein kleiner Zwischenfall - ein vorgefertigtes Schreiben wird von mehreren US-Soldaten unterschrieben und an verschiedene US-Zeitungen geschickt - aufgebauscht und dazu benutzt, den Einduck zu vermitteln, daß alle Meldungen von US-Soldaten aus dem Irak gelogen sind, und daß die US-Armee, auf Anweisungen von der Bush-Administration, systematisch Lügen über die Lage im Irak verbreitet.

Darüber hinaus will man den Eindruck vermitteln, daß alle Kundegebungen von Amerikafreundlichkeit seitens der Iraker gefälscht oder "inszeniert" seien. Dazu dient das Bild, das den Griffito "Thank You USA" zeigt. Eigentlich hat dieser Griffito mit der Geschichte eines "gefälschten" Schreibens nichts zu tun, aber indem man das Bild neben dem Text plaziert, impliziert man auf perfide Weise, daß solche amerikafreundliche Griffiti Teil einer grossen Inszenierung sind, die die US-Regierung zu Propaganda-Zwecke benutzt.

Im Vorfeld des Irak-Kriegs haben die deutschen Medien - an vorderster Stelle "Der Spiegel", "Stern", und die Fernsehsender in iher Gesamtheit - mit ihren einseitigen Reportagen die Idee verbreitet, daß die Mehrheit der Amerikaner und auch die Mehrheit der Iraker gegen den Krieg waren. Um so grosser war für die Deutschen die Überraschung, als die Bilder auf ihren Fernseh-Bildschirmen Iraker zeigten, die die Amerikaner bei ihrem Einmarsch begrüssten - obwohl solche Bilder öfter auf CCN oder NBC zu sehen waren, als auf ARD, ZDF oder N-TV. Die vedutzten deutschen Fernseh-Zuschauer mussten feststellen, daß Iraker in grossen Mengen die Amerikaner begrüssten, sobald sie ihre Furcht überwunden haben, daß sie deswegen von Saddams Schergen umgebracht werden könnten.

Allerdings hatte Deutschlandfunk eine Erklärung für das völlig unerwartetes Verhalten der Iraker. Die jubelnenden Mengen, so klärte der Sender ihre Zuhörer in ihre Berichterstattung auf, seien "inszeniert".

Jetzt dreht sich die Propanda-Mühle der deutschen Massenmedien weiter, die sich bemühen, den Eindruck zu vermitteln, daß die grosse Mehrheit der Iraker gegen die Besatzung durch die Amerikaner ist, und daß die Lage im Irak in jeder Hinsicht besser unter Saddam als unter den Amerikanern war. Gegen die Amerikafeindlichkeit der Iraker sprechen mehrere Umfragen, die im Irak kürzlich gehalten worden sind, aber davon berichten die deutschen Medien wenig oder gar nichts. Im Fernsehen und in der Presse berichtet man nur über die Iraker, die gegen die Amerikaner feindlich eingestellt sind, oder die unter der amerikanischen Besatzung zu kurz gekommen sind. Gestern Abend, zum Beispiel, gab es einen Bericht auf ARD über einen Iraker, der den Amerikanern die Schuld an seiner Arbeitslosigkeit gab. Die eigentliche Gründe für die wirtschaftliche Misere im Irak - Misswirtschaft und Ausbeutung unter Saddam, Sanktionen infolge Saddams Missachtung von UNO-Resolutionen, Krieg usw. - und die jetzige Aussichte auf bessere Zeiten, wurden nicht erwähnt.

[DmComeBack]

@ 8

Entschuldigung, natürlich haben die USA alles richtig gemacht. Haben in der Vergangenheit alles richtig gemacht und werden es natürlich auch in Zukunft tun.

Zur Erinnerung - es gab meherere Saddams!!!

1) Einen, als er der Neger der Amis war. Da war er der gleicht Drecksack (vor 20 Jahren) wie jetzt. Aber da war er der Drecksack der Amis. Das war gut so. Den konnte man die Drecksarbeit gegen den Iran machen lassen.
Und jetzt halt dich fest. Damals gings dem Irak vergleichbar gut!!! Bildungssystem, Geldwert usw.

2)Dann den Saddam, dem Amerika zusagte, er könne da unten machen was er wolle. Dann der II. Golfkrieg. In dem die Engländer und Amerika tolle Märchen verbreiten liesen. Vergewaltigungen. Brutkästen, Oelverschmutzung usw.

3)Und jetzt den verhassten, brutalen usw.usw.usw. Saddam, der sich aber mit Sicherheit die letzten 20 Jahre nicht geändert hatte.
Der die Welt mit schrecklichen Waffen - obwohl jeder wußte, dass er nichts hat, ---- den Rest schenk ich mir.

Ein Land das 12 Jahre von der außenwelt abgeschnitten war -ist ja wohl lachhaft.
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This war on terrorism is bogus

The 9/11 attacks gave the US an ideal pretext to use force to secure its global domination

Michael Meacher
Saturday September 6, 2003
The Guardian

Massive attention has now been given - and rightly so - to the reasons why Britain went to war against Iraq. But far too little attention has focused on why the US went to war, and that throws light on British motives too. The conventional explanation is that after the Twin Towers were hit, retaliation against al-Qaida bases in Afghanistan was a natural first step in launching a global war against terrorism. Then, because Saddam Hussein was alleged by the US and UK governments to retain weapons of mass destruction, the war could be extended to Iraq as well. However this theory does not fit all the facts. The truth may be a great deal murkier.
We now know that a blueprint for the creation of a global Pax Americana was drawn up for Dick Cheney (now vice-president), Donald Rumsfeld (defence secretary), Paul Wolfowitz (Rumsfeld`s deputy), Jeb Bush (George Bush`s younger brother) and Lewis Libby (Cheney`s chief of staff). The document, entitled Rebuilding America`s Defences, was written in September 2000 by the neoconservative think tank, Project for the New American Century (PNAC).

The plan shows Bush`s cabinet intended to take military control of the Gulf region whether or not Saddam Hussein was in power. It says "while the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein."

The PNAC blueprint supports an earlier document attributed to Wolfowitz and Libby which said the US must "discourage advanced industrial nations from challenging our leadership or even aspiring to a larger regional or global role". It refers to key allies such as the UK as "the most effective and efficient means of exercising American global leadership". It describes peacekeeping missions as "demanding American political leadership rather than that of the UN". It says "even should Saddam pass from the scene", US bases in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait will remain permanently... as "Iran may well prove as large a threat to US interests as Iraq has". It spotlights China for "regime change", saying "it is time to increase the presence of American forces in SE Asia".

The document also calls for the creation of "US space forces" to dominate space, and the total control of cyberspace to prevent "enemies" using the internet against the US. It also hints that the US may consider developing biological weapons "that can target specific genotypes [and] may transform biological warfare from the realm of terror to a politically useful tool".

Finally - written a year before 9/11 - it pinpoints North Korea, Syria and Iran as dangerous regimes, and says their existence justifies the creation of a "worldwide command and control system". This is a blueprint for US world domination. But before it is dismissed as an agenda for rightwing fantasists, it is clear it provides a much better explanation of what actually happened before, during and after 9/11 than the global war on terrorism thesis. This can be seen in several ways.

First, it is clear the US authorities did little or nothing to pre-empt the events of 9/11. It is known that at least 11 countries provided advance warning to the US of the 9/11 attacks. Two senior Mossad experts were sent to Washington in August 2001 to alert the CIA and FBI to a cell of 200 terrorists said to be preparing a big operation (Daily Telegraph, September 16 2001). The list they provided included the names of four of the 9/11 hijackers, none of whom was arrested.

It had been known as early as 1996 that there were plans to hit Washington targets with aeroplanes. Then in 1999 a US national intelligence council report noted that "al-Qaida suicide bombers could crash-land an aircraft packed with high explosives into the Pentagon, the headquarters of the CIA, or the White House".

Fifteen of the 9/11 hijackers obtained their visas in Saudi Arabia. Michael Springman, the former head of the American visa bureau in Jeddah, has stated that since 1987 the CIA had been illicitly issuing visas to unqualified applicants from the Middle East and bringing them to the US for training in terrorism for the Afghan war in collaboration with Bin Laden (BBC, November 6 2001). It seems this operation continued after the Afghan war for other purposes. It is also reported that five of the hijackers received training at secure US military installations in the 1990s (Newsweek, September 15 2001).

Instructive leads prior to 9/11 were not followed up. French Moroccan flight student Zacarias Moussaoui (now thought to be the 20th hijacker) was arrested in August 2001 after an instructor reported he showed a suspicious interest in learning how to steer large airliners. When US agents learned from French intelligence he had radical Islamist ties, they sought a warrant to search his computer, which contained clues to the September 11 mission (Times, November 3 2001). But they were turned down by the FBI. One agent wrote, a month before 9/11, that Moussaoui might be planning to crash into the Twin Towers (Newsweek, May 20 2002).

All of this makes it all the more astonishing - on the war on terrorism perspective - that there was such slow reaction on September 11 itself. The first hijacking was suspected at not later than 8.20am, and the last hijacked aircraft crashed in Pennsylvania at 10.06am. Not a single fighter plane was scrambled to investigate from the US Andrews airforce base, just 10 miles from Washington DC, until after the third plane had hit the Pentagon at 9.38 am. Why not? There were standard FAA intercept procedures for hijacked aircraft before 9/11. Between September 2000 and June 2001 the US military launched fighter aircraft on 67 occasions to chase suspicious aircraft (AP, August 13 2002). It is a US legal requirement that once an aircraft has moved significantly off its flight plan, fighter planes are sent up to investigate.

Was this inaction simply the result of key people disregarding, or being ignorant of, the evidence? Or could US air security operations have been deliberately stood down on September 11? If so, why, and on whose authority? The former US federal crimes prosecutor, John Loftus, has said: "The information provided by European intelligence services prior to 9/11 was so extensive that it is no longer possible for either the CIA or FBI to assert a defence of incompetence."

Nor is the US response after 9/11 any better. No serious attempt has ever been made to catch Bin Laden. In late September and early October 2001, leaders of Pakistan`s two Islamist parties negotiated Bin Laden`s extradition to Pakistan to stand trial for 9/11. However, a US official said, significantly, that "casting our objectives too narrowly" risked "a premature collapse of the international effort if by some lucky chance Mr Bin Laden was captured". The US chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, General Myers, went so far as to say that "the goal has never been to get Bin Laden" (AP, April 5 2002). The whistleblowing FBI agent Robert Wright told ABC News (December 19 2002) that FBI headquarters wanted no arrests. And in November 2001 the US airforce complained it had had al-Qaida and Taliban leaders in its sights as many as 10 times over the previous six weeks, but had been unable to attack because they did not receive permission quickly enough (Time Magazine, May 13 2002). None of this assembled evidence, all of which comes from sources already in the public domain, is compatible with the idea of a real, determined war on terrorism.

The catalogue of evidence does, however, fall into place when set against the PNAC blueprint. From this it seems that the so-called "war on terrorism" is being used largely as bogus cover for achieving wider US strategic geopolitical objectives. Indeed Tony Blair himself hinted at this when he said to the Commons liaison committee: "To be truthful about it, there was no way we could have got the public consent to have suddenly launched a campaign on Afghanistan but for what happened on September 11" (Times, July 17 2002). Similarly Rumsfeld was so determined to obtain a rationale for an attack on Iraq that on 10 separate occasions he asked the CIA to find evidence linking Iraq to 9/11; the CIA repeatedly came back empty-handed (Time Magazine, May 13 2002).

In fact, 9/11 offered an extremely convenient pretext to put the PNAC plan into action. The evidence again is quite clear that plans for military action against Afghanistan and Iraq were in hand well before 9/11. A report prepared for the US government from the Baker Institute of Public Policy stated in April 2001 that "the US remains a prisoner of its energy dilemma. Iraq remains a destabilising influence to... the flow of oil to international markets from the Middle East". Submitted to Vice-President Cheney`s energy task group, the report recommended that because this was an unacceptable risk to the US, "military intervention" was necessary (Sunday Herald, October 6 2002).

Similar evidence exists in regard to Afghanistan. The BBC reported (September 18 2001) that Niaz Niak, a former Pakistan foreign secretary, was told by senior American officials at a meeting in Berlin in mid-July 2001 that "military action against Afghanistan would go ahead by the middle of October". Until July 2001 the US government saw the Taliban regime as a source of stability in Central Asia that would enable the construction of hydrocarbon pipelines from the oil and gas fields in Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, through Afghanistan and Pakistan, to the Indian Ocean. But, confronted with the Taliban`s refusal to accept US conditions, the US representatives told them "either you accept our offer of a carpet of gold, or we bury you under a carpet of bombs" (Inter Press Service, November 15 2001).

Given this background, it is not surprising that some have seen the US failure to avert the 9/11 attacks as creating an invaluable pretext for attacking Afghanistan in a war that had clearly already been well planned in advance. There is a possible precedent for this. The US national archives reveal that President Roosevelt used exactly this approach in relation to Pearl Harbor on December 7 1941. Some advance warning of the attacks was received, but the information never reached the US fleet. The ensuing national outrage persuaded a reluctant US public to join the second world war. Similarly the PNAC blueprint of September 2000 states that the process of transforming the US into "tomorrow`s dominant force" is likely to be a long one in the absence of "some catastrophic and catalyzing event - like a new Pearl Harbor". The 9/11 attacks allowed the US to press the "go" button for a strategy in accordance with the PNAC agenda which it would otherwise have been politically impossible to implement.

The overriding motivation for this political smokescreen is that the US and the UK are beginning to run out of secure hydrocarbon energy supplies. By 2010 the Muslim world will control as much as 60% of the world`s oil production and, even more importantly, 95% of remaining global oil export capacity. As demand is increasing, so supply is decreasing, continually since the 1960s.

This is leading to increasing dependence on foreign oil supplies for both the US and the UK. The US, which in 1990 produced domestically 57% of its total energy demand, is predicted to produce only 39% of its needs by 2010. A DTI minister has admitted that the UK could be facing "severe" gas shortages by 2005. The UK government has confirmed that 70% of our electricity will come from gas by 2020, and 90% of that will be imported. In that context it should be noted that Iraq has 110 trillion cubic feet of gas reserves in addition to its oil.

A report from the commission on America`s national interests in July 2000 noted that the most promising new source of world supplies was the Caspian region, and this would relieve US dependence on Saudi Arabia. To diversify supply routes from the Caspian, one pipeline would run westward via Azerbaijan and Georgia to the Turkish port of Ceyhan. Another would extend eastwards through Afghanistan and Pakistan and terminate near the Indian border. This would rescue Enron`s beleaguered power plant at Dabhol on India`s west coast, in which Enron had sunk $3bn investment and whose economic survival was dependent on access to cheap gas.

Nor has the UK been disinterested in this scramble for the remaining world supplies of hydrocarbons, and this may partly explain British participation in US military actions. Lord Browne, chief executive of BP, warned Washington not to carve up Iraq for its own oil companies in the aftermath of war (Guardian, October 30 2002). And when a British foreign minister met Gadaffi in his desert tent in August 2002, it was said that "the UK does not want to lose out to other European nations already jostling for advantage when it comes to potentially lucrative oil contracts" with Libya (BBC Online, August 10 2002).

The conclusion of all this analysis must surely be that the "global war on terrorism" has the hallmarks of a political myth propagated to pave the way for a wholly different agenda - the US goal of world hegemony, built around securing by force command over the oil supplies required to drive the whole project. Is collusion in this myth and junior participation in this project really a proper aspiration for British foreign policy? If there was ever need to justify a more objective British stance, driven by our own independent goals, this whole depressing saga surely provides all the evidence needed for a radical change of course.

· Michael Meacher MP was environment minister from May 1997 to June 2003

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http://politics.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,9115,1036688,…

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[spicault]

The Event of the Age
Iraq is becoming the deciding issue of our time.

Talk, yell, spin, flip, back peddle — so America`s elite pundits endlessly regurgitate the debate over Iraq. Most are terrified that last week`s gloomfy prognosis will be proven foolish by this week`s relative absence of bombings — only in turn to be shown prescient by next week`s turmoil. Those talking heads who gushed "We are all neoconservatives now" last April now slur "Mr. Bush`s War," forecasting doom and perpetual "quagmire." The only constant is that they will probably proclaim themselves to be Wilsonians a year from now when Iraq is calmed down and a consensual government established there. Yet while the elites of America and Europe chatter on, so also does the building of democracy in Iraq.

Indeed, each day the great gamble in Iraq is taking on significance that transcends the immediate tactical advantages that accrued from ridding the world of Saddam Hussein`s savagery. True, the world is a far better place without the worry of Kurdish genocide, 10,000 U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia, perpetual no-fly zones, clumsy U.N. embargos, Abu Abbas loose, guided missiles and WMD programs in Iraq, blood money for suicide bombers, exasperation that Saddam Hussein had violated 1991 agreements, SCUDs raining down on Saudi Arabia and Tel Aviv, assassination plots against American presidents, and so on. But there are other positive rippling effects that are already beginning to become manifest.

States are like people. They do not question the awful status quo until some dramatic event overturns the conventional and lax way of thinking. The autocracies of Latin America resented Spain and Portugal in theory, but themselves only embraced democratic reform after the demise of the old mother tyrannies in Madrid and Lisbon. A newly democratic Hong Kong, South Korea, and Taiwan have played a role in demonstrating to some Chinese that their own dictatorship is a relic of the past. The tottering Soviet Union was the catalyst for freedom among Eastern Europeans, and its failure convinced them that there was no future in state-imposed Stalinism.

So, too, a successful consensual government in Baghdad will serve as a glimpse of what life can be like amid the economic and political stagnation of the surrounding Arab world. More importantly, it will confront radical Islam with a competing ideology that possesses a far more revolutionary message than the Islamists` tired old culture of death that ruined Afghanistan and Iran, wrecked the economy of the West Bank, tore apart Algeria, ended the tourist industry of Egypt, brought international scorn on Saudi Arabia and Indonesia, turned the president of Malaysia into an international laughingstock, nearly made Pakistan an outlaw regime — and led to the reckoning after 9/11. Holdover Soviet-style Baathism didn`t work; Islamic fascism was a failure; tribal dictatorship and monarchies are no better; Pan-Arabism was a cruel joke. The Arab world is running out of alternatives to democratic governments and free markets.

A free Iraq will place a terrible dilemma on the governments and elites of these closed Arab societies who must explain to their own poor and oppressed how satellite pictures of voting Iraqis, Internet cafes, and raucous debates on television are really fabricated images concocted by the American-Zionist international consortium. There is a time bomb ticking in the Middle East, but it is in Cairo and Damascus and Riyadh, where corrupt elites can only pray that things don`t calm down in Baghdad and thereby prompt al Jazeera to switch from tailing dead-end Baathists to interviewing Iraqi parliamentarians.

Iraq is also becoming a reflecting pool of the world at large. Millions are slowly learning how different the United States is from its critics in Europe. France will threaten the awful regime in Libya but only about matters of monetary recompense, in the same manner that money led both it and Germany to trade with Saddam Hussein after 1991 and haggle over oil concessions for the next half century. Neither state would remove a dictator, much less pledge lives and nearly $90 billion to create a democracy in the Middle East. All that is too concrete, too absolute, too unsophisticated for the philosophes, who would always prefer slurring a democracy to castigating some third-world bloody ideologue. The Europeans, remember, are now grandstanding about the need for American "transparency" in the distribution of their paltry few millions in Iraq in a manner that they never demanded of their billions once dumped onto a corrupt Palestinian Authority.

There are bombings regularly in Spain; over 10,000 died in France due to either a defect in its socialist government or indeed in its very national character; and Russia obliterated Grosny. But a single death or bomb in Baghdad alone seems to merit condemnation from the Europeans, whose leaders seem incapable of using the words "victory" and "freedom," much less "sacrifice" and "liberation." They may lavish awards and money on a Jimmy Carter or Susan Sontag, who criticize their own country`s efforts in the midst of a deadly war; but the true moralists are those who risk taking on tyrants, not those who carp from the sidelines that such courageous efforts are sometimes messy. It seems to be a rite of old age for American progressives these days to travel to Europe and trash their alma mater as they troll for the applause of a smug, cynical audience, the more boldly when they are not answered and confronted by independent thinkers abroad. But such showboating is going to be increasingly difficult once a liberal and humane society emerges in Iraq.

These Europeans like multilateral solutions not out of principle so much as because the tortuous process of implementing them creates the illusion that, in the meantime, nothing must be done. Hence, by the time the U.N. acts, most Bosnians or Rwandans or Kuwaitis are long gone, a sort of "talk, talk/die, die policy." Had a Chirac or Schroeder said something like, "With confidence in our values and with right, as we see, it on our side, we shall fight alongside our democratic ally, the United States, and together remove this Dark Age government in Iraq that has butchered so many innocents at home and abroad, and so menaces the peace of all democratic states," he would have doomed his career in a single hour.

For some reason Paris and Berlin — and their American admirers — think that the reconstruction of Iraq should be perfect in six months, despite the fact that European and U.N. efforts in the Balkans are not perfect after a near decade. Yet it is likely that Saddam Hussein — on the lam for six months — will be found more quickly than the odious Radovan Karadzic or Ratko Mladic who, under very suspicious circumstances, are still in hiding inside Europe five years after their hideous regimes collapsed beneath American bombs. And will the Balkans under the U.N. — 13 years so far since hostilities commenced — achieve stability more quickly than Iraq under American auspices? Instead, when the post-9/11 war is all over, all of the dead — Americans, Afghans, and Iraqis — in the first two years of fighting will prove to be a fraction of those slaughtered in the former Yugoslavia during the decade of European non-fighting. We have seen the European new world order, and its pacifist and socialist utopia leads to Sbrenica and an August of mass death in France.

Our own politics are similarly convulsed. The old notion of Democratic idealism is in shambles. Unless Democratic contenders can come up with alternative plans for Iraq or explain exactly why some of them once made a mistake in voting for the war, then their constant carping will remain just that, and will become embarrassingly shrill in the months ahead — witness the ongoing flips, flops, and midair twists of Wesley Clark.

So far the opposition`s only resonance with the American people follows from its line about national self-interest (i.e., better to spend the money here at home on Americans who appreciate it). But if the administration will counter that mantra and daily explain why Iraq is the landmark event of the last 20 years, then these new shameful Copperheads will evaporate as the economy improves and Iraq is stabilized, leaving the Democratic party in the same state of bitter disarray that followed the catastrophic McGovern bid in 1972, which also offered angry protests but no concrete alternative policy.

Removing dictators and implanting democracies, after all, used to be just as much a Democratic idea as was the use of force to ensure national security in a world of dangerous and criminal tyrants. But now the sorry crop of would-be presidents resembles Republican antiwar contenders circa early 1939, who would have been outraged had we agreed to join Britain in stopping a nascent Hitler in Poland and France. We can imagine that the logic of the present hysteria would have led a Howard Dean and company in the dark days of early 1943 to hold press conferences damning those who got us into North Africa or the skies over Germany ("What do all these unnecessary B-17 deaths have to do with December 7?") — especially when we remember that the catalyst of those counter-actions, Pearl Harbor, cost us fewer lives than September 11.

For some reason or another, a series of enormously important issues — the future of the Middle East, the credibility of the United States as both a strong and a moral power, the war against the Islamic fundamentalists, the future of the U.N. and NATO, our own politics here at home — now hinge on America`s efforts at creating a democracy out of chaos in Iraq. That is why so many politicians — in the U.N., the EU, Germany, France, the corrupt Middle East governments, and a host of others — are so strident in their criticism, so terrified that in a postmodern world the United States can still recognize evil, express moral outrage, and then sacrifice money and lives to eliminate something like Saddam Hussein and leave things far better after the fire and smoke clear. People, much less states, are not supposed to do that anymore in a world where good is a relative construct, force is a thing of the past, and the easy life is too precious to be even momentarily interrupted. We may expect that, a year from now, the last desperate card in the hands of the anti-Americanists will be not that Iraq is democratic, but that it is democratic solely through the agency of the United States — a fate worse than remaining indigenously murderous and totalitarian.

Throughout this long, perilous road — the acrimony leading up to the war, the sudden fickleness of Turkey, the last-ditch efforts of the Saddamites to empty their prisons and arm thugs and criminals, the looting of infrastructure, and the destruction of power, water, and transportation facilities — strategy and tactics were constantly in flux and events conspired to make the American effort more difficult with each unforeseen hurdle.

Yet here we stand, a little more than six months later, with a country that was the worst in the Middle East evolving into the best. We are witnessing nothing less than the revolutionary and great moral event of the age, and when it comes to pass, a reborn democratic Iraq will overturn almost all the conventional wisdom, here and abroad, about the Middle East, the nature and purpose of war in our age, the moral differences between Europe and America — and the place in history of George W. Bush.

No wonder the current hysteria looks likely to increase in the months ahead.

National Review