The Rubbish This Time

clipped from www.weeklystandard.com President Bush's plan regarding the Iraq war was audacious and risky. He wanted to prove that an Islamic country could be peaceful and democratic. In order for the project to succeed, the demands for peace and tolerance had to necessarily flow from the Iraqi people. It's amazing how poorly our media and politicians have grasped that last point. It's also more than a little odd. On the left, the most political muscle currently originates with the progressive "Netroots," a group that endlessly extols the importance of "people power." And on the right, the notion of an all-powerful central government dictating the way a society should function has long been anathema. And yet on all points along our political spectrum, there's an often explicit agreement that unless the Iraqi government rapidly transforms itself into an Arabic-speaking version of our Constitutional Congress, the surge will have been for naught. This is rubbish. Indeed, it's un-American rubbish.