More Acknowledgements

It must have really hurt the editors of the New York Times to say this

Still, this has so far been a year of heartening surprises - each one remarkable in itself, and taken together truly astonishing. The Bush administration is entitled to claim a healthy share of the credit for many of these advances. It boldly proclaimed the cause of Middle East democracy at a time when few in the West thought it had any realistic chance. And for all the negative consequences that flowed from the American invasion of Iraq, there could have been no democratic elections there this January if Saddam Hussein had still been in power.

But then in the last paragraph they seem to take up the new leftist meme that Bush was not really responsible for all this, he just happened to be President at the time. Kind of like Reagan was not responsible for the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Over the past two decades, as democracies replaced police states across Central and Eastern Europe and Latin America, and a new economic dynamism lifted hundreds of millions of eastern and southern Asia out of poverty and into the middle class, the Middle East stagnated in a perverse time warp that reduced its brightest people to hopelessness or barely contained rage. The wonder is less that a new political restlessness is finally visible, but that it took so long to break through the ice.

Having now lost the debate about democracy for the Arab world, and the positive consequences from invading Iraq, expect to hear a lot from the left about the inevitability of democracy in the Middle East and the lucky George Bush who happened to be President while it was happening around him.