The W Rope-a-Dope

A great post worth reading:

No one else will say this, so I will. The Bush administration has handled the transfer of power in Iraq more cleverly than anyone expected, including me. The summoning of the U.N. envoy, Lakhdar Brahimi, looked like very bad news (a poisonous old Arab League chauvinist who brokered the sell-out of Lebanon to Syria in 1982). In grim moments, I believed the Bush people were cynically using him to wash their hands of Iraq, and as it were, dump the quagmire back in the swamp of the U.N. Instead, they froze the ground beneath Brahimi's feet, and skated rings around him, haggling behind his back with Iraq's new political heavyweights to leave him endorsing a fait accompli. If it were not vulgar, I would say the Bushies suckered the U.N. into signing on to the New Iraq through Brahimi. A sovereign, free Iraq which will, incidentally, have a few things to say about the U.N.'s $100-billion "oil-for-food" scam, in due course.

Will this new Iraq be plausibly democratic? Too soon to count chickens. An Iraqi government that includes all non-violent factions, with or without elections, is already better than that for which we could have plausibly hoped. Elections on top of this will be gravy.

...Real praise ought to be showered on the Iraqis. This new political class -- consisting of returned Sunni and Shia exiles, Kurds, tribal lords, Shia clerical henchmen, and the odd, semi-halal, Baath-party "technocrat", has proved capable of forming workable coalitions whenever something has had to be achieved. If you read your history of American constitutional wranglings in the 18th-century, you will appreciate how far they came in how little time.

Can they stand up to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's Wahabi terrorists, and Muqtada al-Sadr's Shia blackshirts? Yes, with continuing American help. These are every bit as much America's enemies as Saddam Hussein was, and I daresay the U.S. Marines will continue to oblige. They have done a magnificent job of reducing the numbers of psychopaths loose in Fallujah, Najaf, Kufa, and elsewhere, for much too little praise.

Indeed. I love this quote by Bush:

He says he's not concerned about how journalists judge him: "Short-term history will be written by people who didn't particularly want me to be president to begin with." He expresses a deeper concern: You "can't use your faith as a shallow attempt to garner votes. Otherwise you'll receive the ultimate condemnation."

Emphasis mine.