NOT FALSE:

Is Bush Right?: President's Critics Reconsider Democracy's Prospects in the Middle East (Jefferson Morley, March 8, 2005, Washington Post)

In countries where President George Bush and his policies are deeply unpopular, online commentators are starting to think the unthinkable.

"Could George W. Bush Be Right?" asked Claus Christian Malzahn in the German newsweekly Der Spiegel. Essayist Guy Sorman asked last month in the Paris daily Le Figaro (by subscription), "And If Bush Was Right?" In Canada, anti-war columnist Richard Gwyn of the Toronto Star answered: "It is time to set down in type the most difficult sentence in the English language. That sentence is short and simple. It is this: Bush was right." [...]

Given Bush's insistence that the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq would lead to a democratic political order in the Middle East, many Europeans are "somewhat embarrassed" by these developments, Sorman wrote in Le Figaro.

"Hadn't they promised, governments and media alike, that the Arab street would rise up [against U.S. military forces], that Islam would burn, that the American army would get bogged down, that the terrorist attacks would multiply, and that democracy would not result nor be exported?"

"These dramas did not occur," Sorman says. "Either Bush is lucky, or it is too early to judge or [Bush's] analysis was not false."

Rüdiger Lentz, Washington correspondent for the German broadcast network Deutsche Welle, wrote, "There have been many good reasons to criticize the messianic political style of Bush's first term. But isn't it time now to stop finger-pointing and bickering?"

"After all, one has to acknowledge that Afghanistan and Iraq might have been catalysts for what we see now happening in Lebanon, in Egypt and even between the Palestinians and Israel."

In Germany, the economic daily Financial Times Deutschland accused Europeans of ignoring events in Lebanon. "It is bizarre that here in Germany, where the Berlin Wall once stood, this development (in Lebanon) is greeted with hardly a shrug," according to a translation by Der Spiegel Web site. The paper borrowed a phrase from New Yorker columnist Kurt Andersen saying that Europe is engaging in political "short selling -- hoping for bad news to back up the continent's 'ideological investment'" in opposing Bush.

"Short selling," the paper concluded, "is an honorable strategy on the stock exchange but in terms of democracy, it is looking more and more like a major mistake. Indeed, it isn't honorable at all."

They're Europeans, what does honor have to do with anything?

Posted by Orrin Judd at March 8, 2005 11:58 AM