Mideast Instability: Is That Such a Bad Thing?
Wed, Apr 21, 2004 at 9:45:07 pm PDT
Mark Steyn says the status quo was not working—more than that, it had become dangerous—and the solution might be more Mideast instability.
In the summer of 2002, Amr Moussa, secretary-general of the Arab League, issued a stern warning to the BBC: a US invasion of Iraq would “threaten the whole stability of the Middle East.” As I wrote at the time, “He’s missing the point: that’s the reason it’s such a great idea.”
I thought about Mr. Moussa a lot this past week. I was invited to speak at the United States Naval Academy’s foreign affairs conference, a great honor for a foreigner. I wasn’t the star attraction – that was Condoleezza Rice; I was merely a warm-up act.
Anyway, I was struck by a phrase in Dr. Rice’s address that I don’t believe I’ve heard her use before. She was talking about the fourth plane on September 11th, Flight 93, the one that crashed into a field in Pennsylvania en route to destroy either the Capitol or the White House. If it had reached the latter, that would have been the “money shot” that day, as it was in the alien-invasion flick Independence Day – the center of American power reduced to rubble. What happened on 9/11, said Rice, was an attempt to “decapitate us.” If not for quirks of flight scheduling and al-Qaida personnel management, the headlines would have included “The Vice-President is still among the missing, presumed dead” or – if they’d got really lucky – that the presidency had passed to the president pro tem of the Senate, octogenarian West Virginia Democrat, porkmeister and former Klansman Robert Byrd.
In other words, if you’re wondering why this administration’s approach to terrorism is so focused on regime change, it’s because the terrorists came so close to changing America’s regime.
They’ve since managed to change Spain’s. So why should the traffic be all one way? About two weeks after 9/11, I came to the conclusion that almost anything was better than Moussa’s much-vaunted “stability.” The fetishization of stability was a big part of the problem.
