A year-end rush

The year just past, especially its final month, has served up some interesting and pleasant developments. When it falls to an editorial writer to run down some of the year’s events, he is lucky indeed to get a 2003.

December saw the arrest of the deposed Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, as he emerged from a hole concealed with Styrofoam offering “negotiations.” Nobody seems to have taken him up on the offer, since his bargaining chips were limited to a few unused small arms and a briefcase full of U.S. dollars. But within a day and a half of his surrender, information on the locations of Baathist and Islamist groups began to filter through to the interim Iraqi authorities and the Western forces in Iraq, with serious consequences for those named. The conclusion was inescapable: Hussein had started to talk.

Now reports circulate that the conqueror of Kuwait, the man who promised the “mother of all battles,” is fingering bag men and terrorist operators he once helped to fund. As 2003 closes, the West — or at least that part of it that decided resolve was an improvement on discretion — can reasonably feel that exhiliaration that comes of standing up to the bully and proving to yourself that he’s not nearly as powerful as you made yourself think he was.

It remains to try Saddam Hussein for his crimes, and predictably the elites have already decided they know what’s best. The same people who insisted his removal was purely a matter for the Iraqi people when the Iraqi people could do nothing about him insist his trial must be an international affair, presided over by genteel sorts who would never consider anything so vengeful as a death sentence. Take notice: Hussein will account for his crimes, or the Iraqis will not forgive the West. And they will be right.

In what we read as a further endorsement of the Bush Doctrine, Libya’s chief of state, Moammar Gadhafi, lately offered to acquiesce in “intrusive” inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency and admitted — with touching modesty — that Libya’s program to develop nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, and ballistic missiles, was further along than had generally been believed.

It was a demonstration, crowed European Union President Romano Prodi, of “discreet diplomacy and engagement,” that Gadhafi had opened talks with the European Union — er, no, scratch that, the British — just as the invasion of Iraq was imminent, and capitulated five days after Saddam Hussein was fished out of a hole.

To believe that Gadhafi’s volte-face was the product of “discreet diplomacy and engagement,” moral suasion and Axworthian soft power takes that studied disdain for the facts one can best develop at the upper levels of the Eurocracy. Gadhafi was, through the 1970s and 1980s, a mass-production exporter of terror, in northern and Sahelian Africa, the Mediterranean, and Europe. His present-day apologists forget the “people’s bureaus,” the embassies-by-another-name that sheltered terrorists under the roof of diplomatic privilege. Long before Iraq, Iran or even Syria thought of it, Libya made terror its chief instrument of external policy.

The lord of the Achille Lauro hijacking was attacked once, in 1986, in reprisal for a string of three bombings in central Europe. His adopted daughter was killed in the attack. Even then, he replied with the 1988 Lockerbie airliner bombing; and in the intervening years has actively supported both terrorist groups and some of Africa’s more thuggish rulers. (He is nothing if not selective about his friends.)

Now, Gadhafi is cringing in front of a West of a kind he has never seen before, confessing to Italian premier Silvio Berlusconi that “I saw what happened in Iraq and I was afraid.” (Note well: it is plain enough from his behaviour that Gadhafi, like Saddam Hussein, holds his political power more dear than his family.)

In Iran, militants among the studentry and the professional class promised much but delivered little on July 9, the date they had called for a general strike against the religious authority that actually governs the country. Then again, the mullahs and the violent Basiji security force put down pre-strike demonstrations with such violence that the reformists can hardly be blamed for being cautious.

Even so, the Iranian hierarchy — sensing the hazard posed by a large Western force across its border — has at least adopted the cheat-and-retreat strategy of its old enemy Hussein in saying it will allow surprise inspections by the IAEA. Whether the mullahs will keep their promise is another matter, but at least the genie of verbal concession is out of his bottle.

The Dear Leader, nutty Kim Jong-il, has stayed in his hereditary seat in North Korea, presiding — if you can call it that — over a nuclear missile program, a vast police state, and a curiously selective famine. China has been of little help in getting the North Korean government to see reason but appears to be infinitely patient with the Democratic People’s Republic of Utter Madness. Against that, Kim and the politburo have gone some time now without further taunting their proposed targets in the civilized world. Cautiously, we suggest they may be puzzled about what to do next, and are actually thinking before they speak or act. Even that would be progress.

Here at home, we’ve at last got rid of Jean Chrtien, no thanks to the national Liberal caucus or the party establishment; for them, it was far more important to play the old game of party unity than to get rid of a destructive and deficient prime minister.

The score of ministers that weren’t invited back into the Cabinet is revealing in itself — John Manley, Martin Cauchon, Herb Dhaliwal, Jane Stewart, Allan Rock, and of course the ridiculous Sheila Copps. What we may be seeing is the further evolution of the undeclared one-party state, complete with a Khrushchevian purge of the old regime.

Meanwhile, the newly sutured Conservatives are celebrating in their accustomed fashion by sniping at each other in advance of a leadership race. It is perhaps no solace to them that it won’t take much for Paul Martin to show he’s an improvement on Chrtien. But if Martin clears the bar too tightly, it won’t take much for Stephen Harper, Peter McKay, Bernard Lord, Harvey the Hound, or even Jack Layton or Gilles Duceppe to show they can be an improvement on Martin — and 2005 isn’t that far away.

Down south, we see the threat of a Howard Dean running for the presidency on the Donkey Ticket next year, something which frightens Republicans rather less than it frightens Democrats. Down Under, Simon Crean has finally imploded as Labour Party leader, and the confident and comfortable John Howard stays popular. The doughty Taiwanese taunt mainland China, secure in the knowledge that Beijing, which suddenly cares for international approval, will do nothing. Colombia moves steadily toward order; Venezuela inches slowly back to democracy.

Member countries of the European Union recently turned down a proposed continental constitutional agreement that would have limited national independence in favour of top-down government by an unelected mandarinate in Brussels. Led by Poland and Spain, and in response to reservations from countries now acceeding to the EU, the member states shelved the proposals for now. The democracies are still in charge in Europe, pro tem.

There are developments to balance against these, all the same. One is the regression of democracy in Russia. Vladimir Putin’s moves against the modern Russian plutocracy may have been played as anti-corruption measures, but they coincidentally starved Putin’s political opponents, all of whom have shinier democratic credentials than him, of funds and access to the public.

Southern Africa’s descent into chaos has been gradual but uninterrupted in 2003. A West that “engages” African governments but fears to extend any help directly to Africans will do nothing to reverse that descent. Central Africa has its difficulties, but the Congo, at least, is rising slowly from its nadir.

An Arab dictator in prison, and singing like a bird; another one deciding he’s had enough of the business. The sclerotic Canadian political landscape slowly changing; the American and Australian ones looking friendlier to trusted incumbents. Elected European governments tossing the EU’s ugly creation back in the laps of the Eurocrats. Not bad for a year that was supposed to bring down horror on all our heads.