The British Left Admits it! They Want Democracy in Iraq to Fail.

I made the argument this week, in a conversation with a colleague, that many on the left (Ted Kennedy for one)  in fact want democracy in Iraq to fail.  They are willing to pay any price and bear any burden in order to see George Bush humiliated.  My colleague challenged this assertion and so I set out to gather evidence.  I expected that to be more trouble than it was.  But here in the January 31 issue of the British New Statesman, I found the following:

Alas, there is a very good reason why, as Mr Grey puts it,
many Britons indulge “a sneaking desire to see everything in
Iraq go wrong”. (Not so sneaking, in some cases.) This is not
through any wish deliberately to add to the Iraqi people’s
misery. Nor is it through any wish for vindication among the
invasion’s opponents, who have been amply justified many
times over. It is through fear that George W Bush and Tony
Blair will use any success in creating a democratic Iraq to give
new life to their “freedom” crusade, bringing death, mutilation
and chaos to more countries. Their opponents might
stop regarding disaster in Iraq as their vindication if Messrs
Blair and Bush would stop regarding a successfully completed
ballot as theirs.

So lets get this straight: because Bush and Blair might be encouraged to liberate other countries, at the expense of more "death, mutilation, and chaos," the NS is willing to indulge a "not so sneaking desire" (at least not anymore) to see the people of Iraq end up in the hands of those for whom murder, mutilation, and chaos are the only principles.   This is what has become of the left? 

Who gets vindicated, the right or the left, will surely depend on the final outcome more than anything that has happened so far.  The New Statesman is smart enough to figure this out.  So it is disingenuous of them to pretend that they have already been vindicated.  If Iraq achieves a functioning democracy, and the women with the ink stained fingers end up in charge, Bush and Blair will go down as heroes.  That can't be allowed to happen.  If the folk who pull election workers into the streets and shoot them, who threaten people with death for voting, if those folks win, as the New Statesman desires, that's a small price to pay for winning the political argument at home.

And how does the New Statesman "indulge" that desire that has now dared to speak its name?  In the only way it can: by relentless predicting the desired outcome.