Things are happening to fast. First SA having limited election. Eygpt's president wants to open preseidential elections. Palastine president(or what ever his title is) say third parties to keep their noses out of the peace he plans on seeing with Isreal. Now this. Too much.

Too perfect, actually. There are dangers in speed of change, but, if it weren't for the momentum swinging through the region right now, entrenched governments might be able to wait out the storm.

Sure, there will be some pieces to pick up later, but the mood, the conversation, the entire outlook of the Middle East is in flux right now. And that is a beautiful thing. The status quo was a growing hazard to the rest of the world; now opportunities are presenting themselves that simply didn't exist three years ago.

Amazing.

Silent?!

It should be nothing short of shocking that liberal collectivism (the UN) is mired in impotence and corruption while "unilateralist cowboy imperialism" is creating unprecedented positive changes in the Middle East.

This should be a serious warning sign to the liberals. They're not just on the wrong side of US politics anymore. Their whole ideology is facing irrelevance and utter failure on a worldwide scale.

And as a side note, how pretty is Condi Rice sitting? She's set up to preside over the democratization of the Middle East as US Secretary of State. This thing goes down and she might as well start putting together her mailing list for inaugural invitations in 2009...

To paraphrase Harvey Keitel in "Pulp Fiction", now's not the time to be sucking each other's.....never mind.....the point is to keep the shoulder to the wheel. If success is achieved, there will be plenty to time to expose the poseurs who will no doubt be claiming to have been in support of the winning strategy all along, just as they did after the Berlin Wall fell.

Mike M., don't get cocky. Folks were saying the same thing after Bush41 kicked Saddam's ass out of Kuwait.

I remember the same disappointment among many of my liberal (and German!) friends following the fall of the Berlin Wall. Funny how the spread of freedom and democracy depresses so many on the left.

I kept reading the analogies to the Berlin Wall and the rapid collapse of the Soviet empire as wishful (!) thinking. Now I'm not so sure. Could we really be seeing the absolute implosion of the Middle-Eastern klept-/theo-cracies? Will it really happen this rapidly?

Bush had better be careful, or he's gonna be looked at as behind-the-times in a couple of weeks!

G-d, what great times we live in!

And yes, I've had to keep my mouth shut on many occasions around the house. My wife and I definitely don't see eye-to-eye on our foreign policy. I pointed out what happened in Egypt last week around proposed elections, and her response was: "well, that was in the works anyway. Saddat had been planning on this before he died." !!!!!!

Although she is finally admitting that the Democratic party has left her behind. So there is hope....

I think we're entitled to a little optimism, Scott.

Gulf War I was an example of the failures of collectivist global security. It was a war run by committee, and although it succeeded in its goals, it lacked the resolve to solve the real problems in the region. It was a band-aid on the festering cancer of Saddam's dictatorship, made all the worse when Bush 41 sold out the Iraqis that rose up against Saddam.

I think it's a little different this time around, considering Saddam is in a cell and the entire Arab Street has got election fever. Sure, something might go wrong but why brood and sulk about it when we're witnessing amazing things?

Oh, it's happening everywhere.

Last night, I went to a presentation by minor liberal celebrity Ira Glass, creator and driving force behind NPR's "This American Life." My wife and I enjoy the show and went with friends.

Lots of good applause lines, and much good insight on journalism, radio, and the show. But there was one line greeted with nothing but silence:

"Maybe George Bush was right."

There was no trace of irony or sarcasm.

The best thing that could happen to the left is to learn the lesson: ideological blinkers can blind you to the good that your domestic political foes can accomplish. I think that smart people on the right figured that out after eight years of Clinton. The left should do the same.

On the contrary, now is the time to keep rubbing in the failure of Leftists to be able to think. They never learn anything anyway, leaving a constant grinding assault by free thought upon them as the only option.

It's also like what happens when you sense the kill, though in this case the "kill" never really occurs.

They are your friends? See what they have. I'm going to find out. It's my obligation.

--Their whole ideology is facing irrelevance and utter failure on a worldwide scale. --

Ain't never going to go away, it's the people in charge flawed, not the ideology.

"Could folks like us be the new Silent Majority?"

no

Great letter. Sorry I don't have TrackBack yet. I linked to it here:
http://vietpundit.blogspot.com/2005/02/new-silent-majority.html

Mike M., don't get cocky. Folks were saying the same thing after Bush41 kicked Saddam's ass out of Kuwait.
Posted by: Scott Janssens

The difference being the 1st one was a UN sanctioned operation. The 2nd time was at thehands of a cowboy.

"Could folks like us be the new Silent Majority?"

Yes. Yes. And yes. I formed an entire social circle in NYC out of people who are hawkish neo-con liberals, who have to be in the closet around their lefty friends (which is 75% of Manhattan, especially in the arts and social services, like most of these people). We have a listserv, and go to events, and socialize together and everything. A lot of us met through campaigning for Bush.

We also hang out with the local Republicans, but we are not of them. We are the Lieberman Democrats and the Schwarzenegger Republicans and the Andy Sullivan/Chris Hitchens "eagles."

I think it's time we put together a book of our essays (Whittle was a good start) and formed an official movement. The only problem is what to call it.

I just think "eagle" (Sullivan's take) is corny. My group is called NYC Liberal Hawks, which works for us.

Move to Texas. You don't have to worry about anyone's feelings here.

Shout-out to Jeff in Texas! from an ex-pat Southerner in Manhattan!

And Yehudit is being optimistic: Manhattan went eighty-six percent for Hanoi John. /spit

Being a hawk or conservative here (or Zell Miller Dem. like me) is like belonging to a Communist cell group in the 1930s. We should come up with a secret handshake.

The old lefties need to have their noses rubbed in their errors. Hey, it's a learning process. No one ever challenges them here, anyway, so it's good for 'em.

I asked a nice (but LLL) friend that, if we really Are after All the Oil, why didn't we take Kuwait's oilfields? Defenseless, easy pickings... She stopped and actually thought about it, and had to admit it didn't make sense. One ray of light at a time.

Scott J:

Which only goes to show that Ron Suskind's oft-quoted sneering "reality-based" versus Bushies was, in fact, right on the money.

At the end of the day, if the US chooses not to support democracy, or to liberate the oppressed, then it doesn't happen. As in Iraq in '91. Or Bosnia and Kosovo in the mid-90s.

OTOH, if the US does choose to throw its weight, political, economic, military, and rhetorical, be it against the USSR under Reagan or authoritarian regimes in the Mideast now, then reality changes.

Something the Left fails to understand, bound as they are to larger, more impersonal forces and dismissive of both the power of individuals and of the United States.

The left has been able to escape the burden of so much blood and failure because conservatives have proven reluctant to ram their failures home to Americans.

Look at 9/11, 8 straight years of liberal immigration policy, and a couple of decades of a liberal mindset prevailing at CIA, and yet has the Democrat party truly suffered politically for this disaster. Of course not.

Our withdrawal from Vietnam triggered a bloodbath, did the Democrats pay a price for that?

The cold war, they were bailing on it big time. Reagan and the Republicans had to drag them, kicking and screaming across the finish line to victory. Have they paid a price for getting that one wrong.

Gulf war I, they were against, EVEN AFTER THE Security Council weighed in with its approaval.

The Democrats get off easy, because we are not ramming their miserable failures down their throats.

So to all those, who slink off to revel privately, just to avoid allowing your liberal peers see you celebrate, KNOCK IT OFF.

When good news comes in, be jubilant.

It isn't for you to cringe and retreat to some darkened corner, but for the liberals, for the Democrats, for the morbid defeatists, for those who desire the United States to fail.

Let them be abashed.

Another issue here unobserved, is what should be said of those who grow depressed when good news comes in from this war. For if they are depressed about what is happening in Beirut, they are probably heartened by each car bombing.

These people are not your friends, they may be aquaintances, you may spend time with them, but friendship requires shared values.
These people hate America. And that is the honest and unvarnished truth.

What a breath of fresh air. I told my conservative/libertarian friends that liberals like you existed. Patriots with logical minds. They refuse to believe it. You need to step up and take YOUR party back. You remember, the party of the original JFK.

How come no posts since the pro-Syria, pro-Lebanon, pro-Hizbola demonstrations and the reinstatement of the Prime Minister? The spread of "democracy" seems to have hit a snag somewhere. Like, maybe the US neocon forces spent their wad in the Ukraine fixing that election.

The US is backtracking on Iran, stalled in Iraq and stonewalled in Egypt. Bush's foreign policy is a disaster that only works to serve military/corporate interests. It's a complete failure, though the propaganda ministry is surely working well, and you people are the proof.