The weekly Economist for June 12 placed Iraq on its cover once again. The timing of the cover story was significant. Nine days earlier the Democrats had settled on their presidential nominee – Barack Hussein Obama – for the November election.
The Iraq story had been downgraded by the mainstream media when the Democratic primary contest intensified and when the good news from Iraq, according to the Economist, was “far better than it was only a few months ago.”
The good news from Iraq is indeed far better than merely good. The military surge President George W. Bush ordered in January 2007 under the command of Gen. David Petraeus has worked according to plan in restoring sufficient normalcy to Iraq, which had been keeling over in sectarian-ethnic violence and al-Qaida driven insurgency.
Against the prevailing consensus in Washington that found expression in the December 2006 report of the Iraq Study Group (ISG) – a bipartisan commission co-chaired by former Republican secretary of state James A. Baker and former Democrat congressman Lee H. Hamilton – Bush decided to put more troops on the ground to defeat the insurgency and strengthen the hands of the Iraqi government. The main recommendation of the ISG was phased military withdrawal from Iraq, and diplomatic engagement with Iran and Syria. This was a smokescreen for conceding Iraq as lost to the mayhem of the insurgency worsened by the Sunni-Shia sectarian conflict.
In Washington the Democrats had invested in defeat. They couldn’t have cared less what defeat meant for Iraqis so long as it brought humiliation for Bush.
Through all of 2006 the news from Iraq was ugly. It was against this background that Democrats, in midterm elections, took control of Congress promising an end to the war in Iraq.
But the decision of Bush to send more troops under the command of Petraeus displayed his Trumanesque character by refusing counsel for withdrawal despite his loss of domestic support.
The good news from Iraq, as the Economist reports, is the guns have begun to fall silent. American and Iraqi casualties are down sharply, the sectarian-ethnic conflict is mostly over, al-Qaida insurgents are on the run as Sunni Iraqis have turned against them, and the government of Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki has increased confidence as Iraqi soldiers drove the Shia militia of Muqtada al-Sadr out of the port city of Basra and slums of Sadr City in the capital area of Baghdad.
An Iraq led by an elected government capable of securing its own interests invariably will alter the balance in favour of moderation in the hugely important Persian Gulf region. The effects of a strong and stable Iraq will be enormously positive globally. This will be the Bush legacy, as democratic Korea remains that of Truman, should the good news from Iraq become irreversible with the support of American troops.
The Iraq story, moreover, reveals that all the liberal left talk of solidarity with the poor and the oppressed of Third World countries is merely the empty noise of do-nothing hypocrites when confronted with blood thirsty thugs.
They will decry a Bush rather than advance the freedom of those beaten down by despots.
Iraqis bear witness to this ugly truth and that is why good news from Iraq goes mostly unreported.
He is a member of the Board of Directors for the Center for Islamic Pluralism based in Washington, D.C., a Senior Fellow with the Canadian Coalition for Democracies, and an academic-consultant with the Center for Security Policy in Washington, D.C. He has been a consultant with CIDA on development issues and has published widely in academic journals on foreign policy matters and area studies of the Middle East and South Asia.
Mansur is featured on the documentary Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West produced by the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He also unsuccessfully ran for the Canadian Alliance party in 2000.
Mansur has been accused by Canadian Islamic Congress of using "provocative, self-serving rhetoric", and for "promoting an anti-Arab and anti-Muslim agenda".
He is an Ismaili Muslim.
At a press conference on October 2, 2008, Mansur stated that "Islam is my private life, my conscience...[but] my faith does not take precedence over my duties...to Canada and its constitution, which I embrace freely;" "I am first and most importantly a Canadian;" "only in a free society will you find Islam as a faith and not a political religion." Mansur also criticized New Democratic Party Leader Jack Layton, whom Mansur said "has gone to bed with Islamists", because he is running candidates in Ontario and Quebec who are closely identified with the push for Sharia law.
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