Now They Tell Us

THE MUCH-TYPED “surge” is working. Even the global MSM is noticing, as Instapundit Glenn Reynolds observes. “There seems to be a lot of turnabout going on, all of a sudden,” he writes.

Exhibit A is this cover story in Germany’s Der Spiegel:

Ramadi is an irritating contradiction of almost everything the world thinks it knows about Iraq — it is proof that the US military is more successful than the world wants to believe. Ramadi demonstrates that large parts of Iraq... are essentially pacified today.

Well, do tell. Der Spiegel’s reporter Ullrich Fichtner goes on. It’s a story that the world doesn’t really want to hear, he writes,

a different story, a story of Americans who came here as liberators, became hated occupiers and are now the protectors of Iraqi reconstruction.

The glorious thing about the world’s hegemonic class, the international academic middle class and its bribed apologists in the center-left political parties, is that it can turn on a dime.

It can say at one moment that Bush is a liar and the worst president in history. One week it can have a fawning media breathlessly reporting the latest political ploy of Democrats in Congress to end the war.

The next week we can have the same people writing with wide-eyed innocence, that things aren’t as bad as “everyone” thought. Why, maybe Ronald Reagan wasn’t a complete dunce, maybe government control of everything wasn’t such a good idea after all, maybe the Americans are making progress in Iraq.

In fact, the next step is to say that Ronald Reagan didn’t achieve that much after all. Or that if the right people had been in charge in Iraq then the whole thing could have been wrapped up much sooner.

Yes, we’ll be seeing that pretty soon. Democrats will be elbowing people out of the way to get to a microphone to declare that they were in favor of the “surge” strategy all along and had been trying to get the stupid Bush administration to adopt it for three years without success.

What we, the great unwashed, should understand is that the people we are dealing with represent a ruling class in its declining phase. Softened by the perquisites of power they are just trying to keep the game going a few years longer. Almost everything they have foisted upon us has been a miserable and expensive failure: government pensions, government education, government welfare.

But by golly it has got them votes and it has got them power.

You can’t argue with that. For now.

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