Tuesday, March 8, 2005

"WAS BUSH RIGHT AFTER ALL?"... LEFTY INDEPENDENT GASPS WITH THIS POSSIBILITY

HatTip to Lucianne.com. Great article by Rupert Cornwell of The Independent. This reminds of an interview I saw on MSNBC's Scarborough Country this week. The person from the left was still harping on the fact that WMD were never found and how this was the primary reason for the invasion of Iraqi. Naive, stupid people. WMD was never the real reason, but an excuse for the neoconversative agenda to plant a flag of democracy in the Middle East. As I wrote a while back, even my good friend, JB, a left-wing operative knew the real reason, so either these people should stop acting dumb or actually being dumb so they don't lose credibility.

As Syria pulls out of Lebanon, and the winds of change blow through the Middle East, this is the difficult question that opponents of the Iraq war are having to face.

Trucks carrying Syrian soldiers began to file out of Beirut yesterday. As they departed, Syria's President, Bashar Assad, under intense pressure from the US, promised to withdraw all 14,000 troops to eastern areas of Lebanon by the end of this month. The White House almost immediately dismissed the plan as failing to set a deadline for total withdrawal from the country.

So this was too little, too slow for Washington. But however circumscribed, the first phase of Syria's withdrawal from Lebanon is another sign of change across the Middle East. The precise extent and implications of the pull-out (or to be more accurate pull-back) are still unclear, and the same goes for the host of other developments, from Palestine to Iraq, from Egypt to Saudi Arabia. Some may be sincere and lasting, others contrived and short-lived, but all suggest the political straitjacket that has long imprisoned the Arab world is loosening, if not yet coming apart at the seams.

It is barely six weeks since the US President delivered his second inaugural address, a paean to liberty and democracy that espoused the goal of "ending tyranny in our world". Reactions around the world ranged from alarm to amused scorn, from fears of a new round of "regime changes" imposed by an all-powerful American military, to suspicions in the salons of Europe that this time Mr Bush, never celebrated for his grasp of world affairs, had finally lost it. No one imagined that events would so soon cause the President's opponents around the world to question whether he had got it right.
(full article)

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