Iraq Getting On Its Feet

WHAT IS HAPPENING in Iraq? With Sunnis appearing to be ready to cry Uncle and end their insurgency, the Shias are beginning to reel in their death squads, the chaps who have been retaliating against Sunni outrages by killing Sunnis. StrategyPage reports that

the Shia are ready to fight their own, and in the last week, Shia and Kurdish police and soldiers fought Shia radicals, led by men like Abu Deraa.

I’ve been reading about Germany after its defeat in 1918. It’s an amazing story of the stolid Majority Socialists trying to hold the country together while the Independent Socialists and Spartacus whack-jobs were trying to replicate the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917.

There was no army for several months after the Armistice in November 1918, yet the revolutionary left failed to get the German people to make revolution. And the government, such as it was, moved rapidly to set up a democratic election to create a constitutional assembly two months after the collapse of the Kaiser’s regime.

Imagine that. Friedrich Ebert, head of the government by virtue of the previous Chancellor, Prince Max of Baden, saying “you’re it,” without an army, with the German Army melted away, organizes Germany’s first democratic election and Constitutional Assembly. All in two months while the lefty whack-jobs like Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht are trying to work the German workers up into bloody revolution.

The Iraqis aren’t the Germans. But considering that the Iraqis have elected a constitutional assembly, have elected a legislature, now have an elected government in place, and have an army that is rapidly gaining effectiveness, a student of history would have to say that is growing rapidly more and more difficult to imagine the insurgency destroying the power of the current government.

If, as StrategyPage says, the Shias are starting to move against their own radicals, it is beginning to look as if Bush’s policy is working.

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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Chappies

“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.” —Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

Civil Society

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Francis Fukuyama, Trust

Hugo on Genius

“Tear down theory, poetic systems… No more rules, no more models… Genius conjures up rather than learns… ” —Victor Hugo
César Graña, Bohemian versus Bourgeois

Education

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E. G. West, Education and the State

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Finke, Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990

Conversion

“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.”
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

Postmodernism

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Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy

Faith and Politics

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Pope Benedict XVI, Speech to European Peoples Party, 2006

China and Christianity

At first, we thought [the power of the West] was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity.
David Aikman, Jesus in Beijing

Religion, Property, and Family

But the only religions that have survived are those which support property and the family. Thus the outlook for communism, which is both anti-property and anti-family, (and also anti-religion), is not promising.
F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit

Conservatism

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Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

US Life in 1842

Families helped each other putting up homes and barns. Together, they built churches, schools, and common civic buildings. They collaborated to build roads and bridges. They took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

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