Reply #111: The End of Appeasement

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Do not overlook the date on this.

Bush's opportunity to redeem America's past failures in the
Middle East.

FOLLOWING HANS BLIX'S devastating report and President Bush's
compelling State of the Union address, Saddam Hussein looks more and more
like a dead man walking. In all likelihood, Baghdad will be liberated by April.
This may turn out to be one of those hinge moments in history--events like the
storming of the Bastille or the fall of the Berlin Wall--after which everything is
different. If the occupation goes well (admittedly a big if), it may mark the
moment when the powerful antibiotic known as democracy was introduced into
the diseased environment of the Middle East, and began to transform the region
for the better. For the United States, this represents perhaps the last, best
chance to do what it has singularly failed to do since World War II--to provide
the Middle East with effective imperial oversight. It is not entirely America's
fault, but our mismanagement and misconceptions have allowed a backward,
once insignificant region to become arguably the main threat to the security of
the United States and the entire West.

In centuries past, the wild and unruly passions of the Islamic world were kept
within tight confines by firm, often ruthless imperial authority, mainly
Ottoman, but, starting in the late 19th century, increasingly British and French.
These distant masters did not always rule wisely or well, but they generally
prevented the region from menacing the security of the outside world. When
the pirates of the Barbary Coast (as Europeans called North Africa) could not
be dealt with by the payment of ransom, the new American republic, and then
the Europeans, took matters into their own hands. Ultimately, Algiers, Tripoli,
Morocco, and Tunis were colonized, and thus ended their piratical threat. When
a group of Egyptian army officers led by an early-day Nasser named Arabi
Pasha tried to seize power in 1882, the British occupied the country, and wound
up administering it from behind the scenes for decades to come. When a
fanatical Islamic sect led by a self-proclaimed Mahdi (or messiah) took over the
Sudan, and threatened to spread its extremist violence throughout the Islamic
world, Gen. Horatio Herbert Kitchener snuffed out the movement in a hail of
gunfire at the Battle of Omdurman in 1898. When a pro-Nazi regime took
power in Baghdad in 1941, the British intervened to topple the offending
dictator, Rashid Ali.

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