bucy wrote:

The elections on Saturday were a step toward a peaceful approach to settling disagreements among factions about the shape of the country. If new governments are seated from north to south and east to west, the United States and Iraq can begin the next act in earnest.

What if, in the end, the neocons are actually borne out on this one?

if in 20 years Iraq is a successful democracy then I suspect people will still argue about whether the justifications for launching the war stand up to scrutiny but will agree that injecting democracy into the Middle-East is a net gain and that short term turmoil was the price of long term stability. Sometimes a revolution is necessary. I say this as someone who opposed the war and opposed the surge. The temptation is in argue the ends justify the means. The challenge is to live with moral complexity. Crowing neocons is not the price of peace that worries me. I am not happy about how we arrived at this point and I worry that Iraqi success will lead to further US adventurism and aggression. Regardless of the rights and wrongs of how we arrived at this point seeing any country with such an appalling recent history as Iraq go peacefully to the polls is reason to celebrate and I salute the US military for proving me wrong by demonstrating their ability to sort out a quagmire.

RE: Pointing to a New Era, U.S. Pulls Back as Iraqis Vote - NYTimes.com