“When Marxist dictators shoot their way into power in Central America, the San Francisco Democrats don’t blame the guerrillas and their Soviet allies. They blame United States policies of one hundred years ago. But then they always blame America first.” - Jean Kirkpatrick, former U.S. Ambassador to the UN under Ronald Reagan

The Guardian Left’s propensity to blame the U.S. and Great Britain first – while avoiding expressing such opprobrium for brutal dictators or Islamist terrorists – is truly legion, and was on full display in CiF columnist William Dalrymple’s piece on Nov. 12 entitled “Iraq’s disappearing Christians are Bush and Blair’s legacy.”

He begins:

“When George W Bush sent the US into Iraq in 2003, he believed he would be replacing Saddam Hussein with a peaceful, pro-American Arab democracy that would naturally look to the Christian west for support. In reality, seven years on, it appears that he has instead created a highly radicalised pro-Iranian sectarian killing field, where most of the Iraqi Christian minority has been forced to flee abroad.”

So, George Bush “created” a highly radicalized pro-Iranian…[Christian] killing field.”  Of course, the Islamist terrorists who, you know, actually engaged in the killing seem to bear no responsibility for the brutal murders they committed.

Dalrymple continues:

“Before Bush senior took on Saddam for the first time in 1991, there were more than a million Christians in Iraq. They made up just under 10% of the population, and were a prosperous and prominent minority…Of the 800,000 Christians still in Iraq when Dubya unleashed the US army on Saddam for the second time, two-thirds have fled the country.”

At this point I’m not sure if Mr. Dalrymple is a troll – deployed secretly by conservatives in the UK to discredit the left by advancing arguments which seem to long for the days of the Butcher of Baghdad. (See my post about the “glory days” of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq here)

A CiF commenter summed up Dalrymple’s descent into post-colonial lunacy, and liberal racism, best:

Treat the Arab world like adults?  My guess is that Mr. Dalrymple never thought of such a crazy idea.