Ralph Peters great sense of humour

INSTANT AMNESIA

By RALPH PETERS

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March 22, 2005 -- I SPENT last week in Europe watching acrobats perform. There were no high-wires or circus tents ?- just left-wing intellectuals contorting themselves into bizarre shapes as they "explained" the changing Middle East.

A few Euro-papers raised the possibility that Bush might have been right about some things ?- only to knock down that notion with excuses so convoluted even the writers and editors couldn't begin to believe them. They were trying, desperately, to save face.

The commonly agreed alibi runs that the Middle East was changing on its own, that Anglo-American actions had little or no effect, that the outbreak of democracy has been on the way for years, that the Arabs did it themselves.

Oh, really? Guess our troops overlooked the warehouses full of multi-party ballots when they took Baghdad.

The Independent, a Brit rag that's been hilariously wrong about Iraq, talks around the icky little details ?- such as that minor impediment to democracy, Saddam Hussein. The Iraqis were headed for free elections on their own. No reason at all to praise Bush.

Dead Kurds? Not our kind.

Saddam's slaughter of the Shi'as? Can't quite remember, old man.

Torture chambers? My dear fellow, you must mean Abu Ghraib.

Saddam's wars of aggression, the employment of poison gas and the network of mass graves? Talking about that sort of thing simply isn't done. Anyway, the true aggressors are George Bush and his henchman Tony Blair.

One starts to suspect a movement to nominate Saddam for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Presented with irrefutable evidence of the success of that incoherent cowboy in the White House, the brilliant minds of Europe are glummer than they've been since the Berlin Wall came down (that really hurt).

What intellectuals long for is an audience. And ever fewer people are paying attention. The workers and peasants have lost their faith in the central committee.

It's even getting tough to stage a decent anti-American protest. Despite the overblown media coverage, the "massive" rallies on the eve of Iraq's liberation were small compared to those of the glorious Cold War years when Moscow still provided a beacon of hope and American troops defended Jean-Paul Sartre's right to defend Comrade Stalin.

Last week, on the second anniversary of the start of Operation Iraqi Freedom, the European Left called for mass demonstrations to protest the American "occupation" of the Middle East. The turn-out was pathetic.

My wife and I passed through London on demo day. The temperature was an unseasonable 70 degrees, and the sky was Texas blue ?- perfect weather for a protest.

Instead of attracting hundreds of thousands, the anti-freedom rally was a bust. Londoners were basking in the sun, filling the outdoor cafes around Covent Garden. The burning issue of the day was whether to have beer or wine at lunch.

Strolling down Piccadilly toward Hyde Park, we saw the disappointed protesters straggling home, their signs as slack as their spirits. They came in three sad flavors: Dreary kids of the sort who blame "the system" when they can't get a date; aging Lefties struggling to believe that the Soviet collapse was a hallucination, and Middle Eastern expats outraged that Coalition soldiers had done what they lacked the courage to do themselves.

I don't recall a single protester calling for more democracy in the Middle East. Nobody protested Syria's occupation of Lebanon or the Damascus regime's program of assassinations and terror. Not a single earnest undergraduate demanded free elections in Iran. No one criticized that great human-rights advocate, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

The protesters represented a forlorn hope that the new Middle East would fail. They found little sympathy among a population that had been promised an American defeat, only to find Washington winning again. There was more interest in the tale of the young British soldier who won a Victoria Cross in Iraq than there was in the demonstration.

Europeans are masters of instant amnesia. When they find themselves shamed by history, they simply move on. That's what they're doing now.

In France last week, there were more than 10 times as many strikers protesting a possible lengthening of the 35-hour work week than there were anti-war protesters.

Germans are far more concerned with unemployment levels last seen in the 1930s than they are with Iraq. And the Italian Left's brief moment of delight in the accidental shooting of a hot-dogging agent by American troops has already passed.

And the French government, terrified of being shut out of the new Middle East, is standing shoulder-to-shoulder with its cherished ally and old friend, the Bush administration.

C'est la vie.

Ralph Peters is the author of the new novel "Rebels of Babylon," written under his pen-name Owen Parry.