Andrew Sullivan Swallows A Rather Large Pill

Andrew Sullivan, beloved commentator of the left, probably won't be finding himself linked too often from the leftistphere this week. They hate it when logic seeps into perfectly good idealogy. Although it's grudging and at times a bit silly, Sullivan takes a big-boy step away from the far left on the subject of Iraq.

"...if the debate in Washington signifies anything, it appears that the Iraq adventure should be understood at this juncture neither as a phenomenal success but nor as a failure of any profound kind. In the words of Donald Rumsfeld, the defence secretary, it’s still a long hard slog. But the slog now has a clearer direction — and it’s not that far from what the dreaded neoconservatives once hoped for."

This next is my favorite part of the column. It goes hand in hand with the racist notion that the people of Iraq wouldn't be able to grasp democracy. Too much dictatorship, the residents cowed and without the will. Of course, Sullivan references the "ethnic differences," and kind of skates around it, but hey...we know two-plus-two.

Some told us that ethnic differences were so deep this would never happen. They were wrong. So the fact that the US is now seriously contemplating reductions in troop numbers in the medium term is not seen as a sign of cutting and running, but of slow, tentative success.

Sullivan hasn't turned off the spin spigot entirelly, to which the next paragraph (most of which is the usual leftist, hindsight, ankle-biting) attests, but he deserves a chance to take his best shot, considering he follows by conceding a major point.

It isn’t the success war-supporters like me wanted. We drastically underestimated the potential for a Ba’athist-jihadist insurgency; we got the WMD issue grotesquely wrong. Nostra culpa. The Bush administration compounded these errors with dumb-as-a-post decisions, like co-opting Abu Ghraib to torture and kill innocents or delaying elections long enough to allow insurgents to seize the initiative.

One day we will find out with more precision who screwed up and how. But in one fundamental sense President George W Bush didn’t screw up. His simple conviction was that there would be no real solution to the threat of Islamist terror unless we grasped the nettle of Arab autocracy, unless we created a space for freedom in that part of the world.

The final sentence is really the bottom line isn't it? If grasping the "nettle of Arab autocracy" is the genesis of a "real solution," than the "dreaded neoconservatives" were very much right about the proper strategy for defeating Islamic terrorism. That's a large pill to swallow for a guy like Sullivan.

Then again, it was his pill to swallow, wasn't it?