A pitch in Steyn

Mark Steyn sounds off on developments in Iraq and the Middle East.

The other day in the Guardian, house journal of the British left, Martin Kettle wrote:

"The war was a reckless, provocative, dangerous, lawless piece of unilateral arrogance. But it has nevertheless brought forth a desirable outcome which would not have been achieved at all, or so quickly, by the means that the critics advocated, right though they were in most respects."

Very big of you, pal. And I guess that's as near a mea culpa as we'll get: Even though George W. Bush got everything wrong, it turned out right. Funny how that happens, isn't it?

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If past behavior is any indication, those who opposed the war will soon be making the case that democratization was inevitable, and everyone saw it coming.

Was the war in Iraq justified? Has it merely been a mitigated disaster, or might have been an actual success?

On May 8, 2003, a couple of weeks after the fall of Saddam, I wrote:

"You don't invade Iraq in order to invade everywhere else. You invade Iraq so you don't have to invade everywhere else."

And so it's turned out. Some of the reasons for starting to remake the Middle East in Iraq were obvious within a day or two of September 11, 2001: By his sheer survival, Saddam had become a symbol of America's lack of will – of the world of Sept. 10, 2001.

One unexpected success has been the election. With hundreds of parties on the ballot, there was no group large enough to seize power. That meant groups had to cooperate, reach out, and negotiate. With violent means ruled out, Iraqis had to turn to non-violent means to obtain power. They had to engage in politics.

Now, "politics" has gotten a bad rap over the years. Indeed, it's very nearly a swear word in places. However, the word traces back to the Sumerian word for "city" – we see its traces in the suffix "-polis", among other places. When a large group of people get together, enough people to make a city, they need to learn various skills to work together without killing each other. That set of skills is politics.

For all its faults and irritations, politics is the alternative to violent conflict.

By creating a marketplace for power – in other words, a political system forces people to trade for power. Instead of forcing people to abide by a leader's wishes at gunpoint, leaders have to give people something they want. They have to trade some sort of benefit for the power people give them. And in a free market, a trade occurs only when both sides want what they're getting more than what they're trading away.

Things could still blow up in Iraq, but the longer people trade for power instead of seizing it, the more hopeful the situation becomes.