A Very Nice Article

From The Australian

Read the whole thing here highly recommended.

Excerpts:


You can argue about the surge. The evidence is encouraging that the increased US military effort, together with a change in tactics, has reduced the violence in Iraq. On the other hand there are legitimate questions about the long-term viability of the strategy. But if the US is to emerge from Iraq with a renewed sense of its global role, you shouldn't really debase the motives of those who lead US forces there. Because, in the end, what they are doing is deeply honourable -- fighting to destroy an enemy that delights in killing women and children; rebuilding a nation ruined by rapine and savagery; trying to bridge sectarian divides that have caused more misery in the world than the US could manage if it lasted a thousand years.

It is helpful to think about Iraq this way. Imagine if the US had never been there; and that this sectarian strife had broken out in any case -- as, one day it surely would. What would we in the West think about it? What would we think of as our responsibilities?

There would be some who would want to wash their hands of it. There would be others who would think that UN resolutions and diplomatic initiatives would be enough to salve our consciences, if not to stop the slaughter. But many of us surely would think we should do something about it -- as we did in the Balkans more than a decade ago -- and as, infamously, we failed to do in Africa at the same time.

And we would know that, for all our high ideals and our soaring rhetoric, there would be only one country with the historical commitment to make massive sacrifices in the defence of the lives and liberty of others, the leadership to mobilise efforts to relieve the suffering and, above all, the economic and military wherewithal to make it happen.