Giving thanks where thanks are due

Someone at the WaPo (Jim Hoagland, in this case), is acknowledging Bush's role in the positive changes taking place in the Middle East: "[I]t is a Middle East in which those who believe in democracy and civil society are finally actors, even though we still face big obstacles,' says Saad Eddin Ibrahim, Egypt's battle-scarred democratic activist. Ibrahim originally opposed the invasion of Iraq. But it 'has unfrozen the Middle East, just as Napoleon's 1798 expedition did. Elections in Iraq force the theocrats and autocrats to put democracy on the agenda, even if only to fight against us. Look, neither Napoleon nor President Bush could impregnate the region with political change. But they were able to be the midwives,' Ibrahim told me in Washington."This is what Mark Steyn has been saying all along: that the status quo political style that characterized the entire Cold War approach to the Middle East allowed the area to become stagnant and poisonous. Sometimes change, while brutal, purges tyranny.