WSJ.com - Hostage to Fortune

An interesting article on several levels.

"No leader since Napoleon has roiled the Middle East as has George W. Bush. By invading Iraq, President Bush set history in motion. By doing so without a strategy for governing it afterwards, he did not plan for the worst, and so the worst has happened. Iraq has become the pivot for strengthening the radical forces that the invasion should have weakened. Yet to assume history follows a straight path is fatalism, not analysis...."

Believing that we could bring democracy to Iraq without doing any of the institutional or cultural spadework (or placing enough boots on the ground) was a disaster, but not the end of the world. Lets keep our eye on the ball of preventing an enormous tragedy over Iran, as well as the further unraveling of any stability that ever existed in the Arab world. As I suggest in a recent piece, this will require that we work closely with our Arab Sunni "moderate" dictatorial allies. How we square this with our commitment to the blooming of democracy in the Mideast must wait until after the Iran showdown is behind us.

WSJ.com - Hostage to Fortune