Digging Out of the Cesspit of Stability

The always entertaining Mark Steyn has written another piece of insightful and counter intuitive analysis for The Spectator. As we move ever closer toward our long-anticipated land invasion of Iraq, voices of protest increasingly fret that such an invasion would have terribly consequences for the stability of the other regimes in the region. It certainly would, and all the better for it, writes Steyn:

“What’s the real long-term war aim of the United States? I’d say it’s this — to bring the Middle East within the civilised world. How do you do that? Tricky, but this we can say for certain: you’ll never be able to manage it with the present crowd — Saddam, the Ayatollahs, the House of Saud, Boy Assad, Mubarak, Yasser. When Amr Moussa, secretary-general of the Arab League, warns the BBC that a US invasion of Iraq would ‘threaten the whole stability of the Middle East’, he’s missing the point: that’s the reason it’s such a great idea. Suppose we buy in to Moussa’s pitch and place stability above all other considerations. We get another 25 years of the Ayatollahs, another 35 years of the PLO and Hamas, another 40 years of the Baathists in Syria and Iraq, another 80 years of Saudi Wahabbism. What kind of Middle East are we likely to have at the end of all that? The region’s in the state it’s in because, uniquely in the non-democratic world, it’s too stable. It’s the stability of the cesspit.”

With the current governing factions we’re faced with in the Middle East, who wouldn’t want destabilization? Some observers fear that less stability means more radicalism and unpredictable use of force. But the U.S. is already being hunted from the shadows by a global network of terrorists covertly financed and encouraged by the same regimes who’s stability were are supposed to be so protective of. And after all, how exactly are the people who are willing to become suicide bombers supposed to become any more radical? Organized militaristic Islam wants every Jew on the face of the earth exiled from Palestine or dead, whichever is easier. Any degree of radicalism past that is a distinction without a difference.

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