Remarkable events today in Lebanon.
Jeff's latest installment of his running series "Creating new terrorists: Chimpy McHitlerBurton's smirky rodeo ride through history continues" has several links worth reading including this post at Daily Pundit which features this comment by Steven Den Beste.
This is the payoff. This was always the most important reason for the invasion of Iraq. I am a bit surprised by how fast it's beginning to happen, but I never doubted that any of this would eventually take place. It was always the goal of what we did.
But it is not really the Iraqi election that set this off. It was, in fact, the US election that did it. The entire region held its breath because it needed an answer to this question: Will the Americans see this through? When Bush won, the answer was "yes". Now they know that there will be four more years of American pressure, and they know that 4 years is a long time and a lot can be accomplished in that time.
If Kerry had won in November, turnout in the Iraqi election would have been low and none of the rest of this would have happened. A Kerry victory would have been treated in the region as an indication that the Americans had given up.
Michael Ledeen also makes an appearance in the same thread.
How long do you think it will be before the Iranian students start singing "So you wanna have a revolution?"
Maybe Condi could play it at her next recital.
There's lots of other stuff worth reading at the Daily Pundit thread where SDB has set up shop. Since he was one of the most important minds that rounded out my thinking on Iraq it's great to hear from him again.
Also, Captain Ed has a real nice ode to the men who made it their policy to change the status quo.
After watching nothing but stagnation for decades and an Arab populace that appeared resigned to oppression all along, one has to ask: what changed? Why now? The answer, history will show, will be two men: George Bush and Tony Blair, with John Howard of Australia playing the unsung hero.
One more, The Cool Blue Blog sees not only dominoes but checkers too.
UPDATE
Steyn's latest should be read in full and probably deserves its own post (especially because it's tomorrow's column and doesn't account for today's events in Lebanon) but I'd just like to excerpt this paragraph that cracked me up.
Just so. Left to their own devices, the House of Saud - which demanded all US female air-traffic controllers be stood down for Crown Prince Abdullah's flight to the Bush ranch in Crawford - would stick to their traditional line that Wahhabi women have no place in a voting booth; instead, they have to dress like a voting booth - a big black impenetrable curtain with a little slot to drop your ballot through. Likewise, Hosni Mubarak has no desire to take part in campaign debates with Hosno Name-Recognition. Boy Assad has no desire to hand over his co-Baathists to the Great Satan's puppets in Baghdad.