More Rethinking

The World Opinion Roundup column of the Washington Post shows some of the new opinions from newspapers around the world.

In countries where President George Bush and his policies are deeply unpopular, online commentators are starting to think the unthinkable.

"Could George W. Bush Be Right?" asked Claus Christian Malzahn in the German newsweekly Der Spiegel. Essayist Guy Sorman asked last month in the Paris daily Le Figaro (by subscription), "And If Bush Was Right?" In Canada, anti-war columnist Richard Gwyn of the Toronto Star answered: "It is time to set down in type the most difficult sentence in the English language. That sentence is short and simple. It is this: Bush was right."

The concensus seems to be that Bush's and the "neo-cons'" idea of invading Iraq to change the dynamics of the Arab world has borne fruit. At the same time there is a large segment of the Left that simply refuses to acknowledge that anything that Bush does can be positive. This type of childish negativism is perfectly exemplified by this post.

Sometimes you just have to give credit where credit is due. Like Chauncey Gardner in Being There, right now everything in the Middle East seems to be coming up roses for George W. Bush - and the United States.

But like Chauncey, Bush the born-again democratic idealist has a series of happy accidents to thank for his success. The combination of the death of Arafat, Viktor Yushchenko's dioxin-tainted soup, bungling Syrian intelligence agents, and an all-powerful Shi'ite cleric may have snatched victory from the jaws of defeat for Bush. In large part, it appears to be fate, not foresight, that has been the engine of democratic reform in that part of the world.

In the same way that Reagan had absolutely nothing to do with the collapse of the Soviet Union ("it was going to happen anyway" was their argument), Bush has nothing to do with the sweeping changes taking place in the Middle East. I am not clear how one can honestly argue that had we not invaded Iraq, Libya would have given up their WMD program, elections would have been held in Iraq and the Palestinian Authority, Egypt and Saudi Arabia would be talking about democratization, Lebanese would be protesting against Syria. Yet this is the new meme of the deluded Left. Of course evertything negative that has transpired is undoubtedly Bush's fault. Intellectual dishonesty and vapidity.