As John Miller pointed out a year ago in National Review, William Shawcross, former liberal, switched sides, putting himself on the British left’s list of turncoats, an honor roll that includes Christopher Hitchens and George Orwell.
In a Sunday article in the L.A. Times headlined “Peace Is Not the Answer,” Shawcross wonders why the peace movement turns a blind eye to the slaughter of innocents in Iraq. He notes the absence of “rage against the daily assaults on children, women, anyone, by Islamo-fascists and ordinary national fascists.” It is, however, “cool,” Shawcross says, to decry U. S. crimes.
“It’s hard to think,” Shawcross writes, “of a more graphic illustration of the horror the U.S.-led coalition is fighting in Iraq than the mass murder on Sept. 26, in which terrorists disguised as policemen (a New York Times headline called these butchers ‘fighters’) burst into a primary school in Iskandaria, south of Baghdad, seized five teachers (all Shiites) and shot them dead. Children stood weeping through this atrocity.
“Why do crimes like this make so little impression on those Americans and Europeans who want the coalition to abandon Iraq? The demonstrators think of themselves as moral, but it is hard to think of any policy more amoral than abandoning Iraq to such an enemy.
“Iraqis are dismayed by the mistakes made by the coalition. They don’t like the continued presence of foreign troops. But they like the prospect of being abandoned prematurely to the terrorists even less.”
According to Shawcross, Iraqis disagree with peace movement icon Cindy Sheehan’s contention that her soldier son Casey, killed in Iraq, died for nothing.
Quoting Amir Taheri, Shawcross contends that, although the fledgling nation’s constitution is flawed, Iraq is “still the most democratic constitution offered to any Muslim nation so far.”
“That is thanks to the sacrifice of Casey Sheehan and others. It should be a source of pride in the United States. Thanks to the coalition Iraqis have more confidence in their future than we do. Iraqi refugees are not fleeing abroad in vast numbers, as happened during previous crises. The Iraqi dinar has strengthened, not weakened, against the currencies of other oil-producing nations. The mistakes that have been made in Iraq since its liberation do not alter the fact that the overthrow of Hussein has given Iraqis a chance they never had before and has shaken the ramshackle, corrupt and dictatorial foundations of the Middle East.
“That, of course, is why there is such bloody resistance. U.S. soldiers are being killed not by romantic nationalist insurgents (as some liberal journalists and marchers like to pretend) but by an unholy grouping of Saddamite gangsters furious at losing power, Syrian and Iranian agents intent on creating mayhem and then theocracy, and Islamo-fascists who want to enslave the world and whose local Pol Pot, Abu Musab Zarqawi, boasts of seeking to murder as many of Iraq’s majority Shiite population as he can.”