Was Bush Right After All?

It seems a recent Newsweek cover story on Lebanon's so-called Cedar Revolution headlined "People Power,"was followed by a secondary headline that said "Where Bush Was Right."

Michael Barone of U.S. News and World Report seems to think he may have been: (highlights mine)


"Evidence abounds. Consider what is happening in Lebanon, long under Syrian control, in response to the assassination, almost certainly by Syrian agents, of former Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri. Protesters have taken to the streets day after day, demanding Syrian withdrawal. The Washington Post 's David Ignatius, who covered Lebanon in the 1980s and has kept in touch since, has been skeptical that the Bush administration's policy would change things for the better. But reporting from Beirut last week, he wrote movingly of "the movement for political change that has suddenly coalesced in Lebanon and is slowly gathering force elsewhere in the Arab world."

Ignatius interviewed Walid Jumblatt, the Druze leader long a critic of the United States. Jumblatt's words are striking: "It's strange for me to say it, but this process of change has started because of the American invasion of Iraq. I was cynical about Iraq. But when I saw the Iraqi people voting three weeks ago, 8 million of them, it was the start of a new Arab world. The Syrian people, the Egyptian people, all say that something is changing. The Berlin Wall has fallen. We can see it."

As Middle East expert Daniel Pipes writes, "For the first time in three decades, Lebanon now seems within reach of regaining its independence."

Minds are changing in Europe, too. In the left-wing Guardian, Martin Kettle reassures his readers that the Iraq war was "a reckless, provocative, dangerous, lawless piece of unilateral arrogance" --the usual stuff. "But," he concedes, "it has nevertheless brought forth a desirable outcome which would not have been achieved at all, or so quickly, by the means that the critics advocated, right though they were in most respects." Or read Claus Christian Malzahn in Der Spiegel . "Maybe the people of Syria, Iraq, or Jordan will get the idea in their heads to free themselves from their oppressive regimes just as the East Germans did," he writes. "Just a thought for Old Europe to chew on: Bush might be right, just like Reagan was."

The people of MoveOn.org, Kos, and Air America have to be tearing their hair out and gnashing their teeth on these quotes. And get the ones here in the U.S.:

"On Nightline, the New York Times 's Thomas Friedman and, with caveats, the New Yorker 's Malcolm Gladwell agreed that the Iraqi election was a "tipping point" (the title of one of Gladwell's books) and declined Ted Koppel's invitation to say that things could easily tip back the other way. In the most recent Foreign Affairs , Yale's John Lewis Gaddis credited George W. Bush with "the most sweeping redesign of U.S. grand strategy since the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt,"


It takes great political courage to admit when you are wrong. These quotes amaze and gratify me. Whether you were for or against the war, no one doubted that things needed to change in the middle east. Bush is nothing if not a man of action. He was determined to spread freedom and it seems to be having a snowball effect. I am no middle east expert by any stretch of the imagination and I think we all worried, even us on the right, wondering if we had done the right thing. But hearing middle east experts say these things gives me hope for a better world.

Bush said he would shake things up. And, oh boy, did he.