The Splittist Entity

I only just found the transcript of The European Pulse, a CNN program aired Friday June 25 (and that I mentioned here). The "distinguished" novelist Frederick Forsyth (I didn't realize he was distinguished--maybe that just means "old") was one of a number of panelists. In response to the moderator Richard Quest's question, "How will history judge this moment and this war?" he says,

Broadly speaking, history judges things benignly when they succeed. And is hypocritical when they fail. So the jury is still out. We don't know whether this massive experiment will succeed of fail. If it fails, and Iraq lurches back into anarchy and chaos and civil war, then history will condemn every single thing that we did for the past 14, 15, 18 months. But if it succeeds, then doubtless Mr. Blair will be regarded as a statesman.

In response to Lilli Gruber, an Italian "prominent former broadcaster" and now an elected member of the European Parliament, who asked,

The question is, how long is it going to take until we can say it was a success? That's the question, excuse me. Does it take 10 years, 20?

Forsyth replies

Richard, what we are witnessing is a regime change in Iraq. It's the seventh in my lifetime. And I don't remember anyone making a fuss about the first six.

When asked whether what has taken place in Iraq is right from the standpoint of realpolitik rather than morality, he responded,

...If you're talking realpolitik, then I'm amused and puzzled by Lilli and her...regret for the Iraqi war because I remember Italian forces flying wingtip to wingtip, and indeed, the Iron Cross of Germany flying wingtip to wingtip with the world air force when we bombed Serbia back to the stone age in order to spare the Kosovan people from the pogroms of a dictator called Milosevic...

I don't remember Italy objecting to that liberation. I don't remember Germany objecting to that liberation. I certainly do recall the Foreign Legion being side by side the British Tommies, waiting in the Albanian fields to invade Kosovo. Now as that was not sanctioned by the United Nations either, one wonders why one is so moral and the other is immoral? That's all.

Asked if it was just about getting rid of a dictator, is that morally sufficient? He responds,

Really it depends, really on what attitude you have toward the hypocrisy of power politics. We got rid of Milosevic, no question about that, and really it was in fact, NATO, the European wing of NATO, asking the Americans to help, which they did.

We also liberated the people of East Timor. And nobody, as far as I recall, complained about that.

Americans unilaterally deposed a dictator in in the island of Grenada and later another one in the Republic Panama. And nobody that I recall complained much about that.

So in other words, we do select our dictators, those who should properly be deposed and those who really should be allowed to get on with it.

One last thing, if I may, about the hypocrisy within Islam because this Sunni Muslim dictator actually wiped out, with the assistance of General al-Majid, 100,000 Shi'a Muslims. And do you know what the reaction from Islam was? Stunning, total, deafening silence.

In the same program, Niall Ferguson argues that

from the military point of view, it was clear that it didn't need any European involvement at all, didn't really need British military involvement, as Donald Rumsfeld also said in a rather unguarded moment. But from the point of view of legitimacy, legitimacy being a far more important thing in this situation than military capability, it desperately did need some kind of European involvement.

When the moderator asks what Europe can do to influence the United States, Nicole Bacharan, a French political scientist replies,

There are things that can be done. I mean, the United Nations resolution was one step, even if it's not much help. It does bring legitimacy. And you have a number of social and economic ways of helping, and helping the Iraqis finding their step on the international scene.

So with out the blessing of the UN, there is no legitimacy. By this logic, since the UN does not recognize Taiwan, Taiwan is not a legitimate entity. Let's see, if Israel is "the Zionist entity, let's make Taiwan "the splittist entity".