The Invisible Hand

Iraq is Free. Germans Troubled.

The signing in Baghdad yesterday of the most liberal constitution in the Arab Middle East is cause for concern in Germany according to this news round-up from the ominously named Deutsche Welle.

Yes, the new Iraqi constitution is a landmark achievement and could possibly be the dawn of a revolution of freedom and democracy in the otherwise dark reaches of oppressive medieval theocracy, but that's no reason to celebrate say the German media in unison.

Certainly the unlawful military means of achieving this triumph of human dignity in no way justify the noble end of rescuing tens of millions of innocent Iraqi men, women and children from a barbarically cruel fascist dictatorship, reversing the smothering tide of oppression that has choked off economic and social development in the Arab world and elevating the rights of free people in the region for the first time in living memory.

To say otherwise might be to suggest that the simplistic cowboy Bush was in some way responsible for the seedling of freedom that has begun to take root in the arid wastelands of Saddam's Kingdom of Pain. (A kingdom, by the way, that was always reliably accommodating to German engineering firms.)

No, there is a right way and a wrong way to overthrow fascist tyranny.

Military force never solves anything according to the presumably de-Nazified German press.

Let the Iraqi people rise up and throw off the yoke themselves just like the Germans did in 1932 and 1938 and 1941, '42, '43, '44 and finally in 1945.