NY Times gives Bush credit for Mideast progress

[quaoar]

Sorry, but I can't give Bush any credit for what is currently going on in Lebanon. The popular uprising in Lebanon was ignited by the assassination compounded by years of putting up with Syrian occupation.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/01/opinion/01tue1.html?

It's not even spring yet, but a long-frozen political order seems to be cracking all over the Middle East. Cautious hopes for something new and better are stirring along the Tigris and the Nile, the elegant boulevards of Beirut, and the impoverished towns of the Gaza Strip. It is far too soon for any certainties about ultimate outcomes. In Iraq, a brutal insurgency still competes for headlines with post-election democratic maneuvering. Yesterday a suicide bomber plowed into a crowd of Iraqi police and Army recruits, killing at least 122 people - the largest death toll in a single such bombing since the American invasion nearly two years ago. And the Palestinian terrorists who blew up a Tel Aviv nightclub last Friday underscored the continuing fragility of what has now been almost two months of steady political and diplomatic progress between Israelis and Palestinians.

Still, this has so far been a year of heartening surprises - each one remarkable in itself, and taken together truly astonishing. The Bush administration is entitled to claim a healthy share of the credit for many of these advances. It boldly proclaimed the cause of Middle East democracy at a time when few in the West thought it had any realistic chance. And for all the negative consequences that flowed from the American invasion of Iraq, there could have been no democratic elections there this January if Saddam Hussein had still been in power. Washington's challenge now lies in finding ways to nurture and encourage these still fragile trends without smothering them in a triumphalist embrace.

[applegrove]

1. Please. Yasser Arafat died. And unless Bush wants to take credit

for that...

[moondust]

15. Exactly.

And I wouldn't rule that out.

[Up2Late]

2. Who's the writer? Thomas Friedman?

In almost never agree with him.

[Cha]

3. It's a nyt's editorial ..which means..

I think.. that the corporate board of the nyt is sucking up to bush.

[autorank]

4. Has Jimmy/Jeff been visiting the Gray Lady? Inquiring minds...

[Avalux]

5. This is an editorial and I can't find the author -

anyone else? :shrug:

[Gloria]

6. What advances????

Are these people on DRUGS???

Nasrullah is sitting in Lebanon ready to rumble.

In Egypt, the "elections" are set up to favor the status quo.

In Saudi Arabia, the municipal elections (no women allowed) didn't change one thing.

In the Palestinian-Israel conflict, analysts say there are only a few months of wiggle room before the pressure over the 7,000 prisoners still held by Israel will mount. The token release recently was meaningless. These prisoners got off the bus angry--many were held without being charged and/or were about to be released anyway. Small potatoes, the big guys are still in jail. Abbas is getting nowhere with Israel on this key issue.

In Afghanistan, Karzai just appointed Gen. Dostum, war criminal, to be head of the new Afghan army. There is a lot of sentiment in the country about wanting war criminals punished.

[Fridays Child]

7. Thank you. It's just more lipstick on pigs, imo.

[Avalux]

8. Please do not post this as credible news

it's an editorial by an unknown author; it's probably a neocon masquerading - they invade editorial pages all the time. Your title is inaccurate.

[quaoar]

10. The title is quite accurate

It is an editorial and as such represents the opinion of the publishers of the NY Times.

Newspaper editorials are almost never signed.

[TayTay]

9. Sounds like the Times is getting ready to suck up again

Maybe they are trying for that 'Get out of Jail' card for Judith Miller and figure lips planted firmly on * Admin butt will be just the thing to get it for them.

Yuck! The Times used to have some integrity. Not anymore.

[Democrats_win]

11. 1984 newspeak: sucess= massive bomb in Baghdad killing 115, Tel Aviv bomb

Assasination of former Lebanon pm. Iran signing nuclear pact with Russia, major pipeline attacks in Iraq last week, Over ten Americans killed in the past few days, and OBL asking Jordan terrorist to attack America. no sign of democracy.

[Lexingtonian]

12. provincial idiocy

The bar keeps on getting lowered for the Bushies.

This editorial is a suck up to and denial booster for their neocon subscribers in the Five Boroughs.

Lebanon is far from "free" or anything of the sort. As for "progress", 14,000 Syrians is (as we now know so well) a very small time occupation- and it mostly had to do with keeping the Israelis out of seizing hegemony and skimming money from the drug crops being grown in the Beka'a Valley. Now that Afghanistan and Burma are back to blockbuster levels of poppy opiate drug production (for which they thank the Bushies, of course), the Beka'a growers are uncompetitive at supplying the Russian and European markets.

If the U.S. has offered guarantees that Sharon won't be allowed to occupy Lebanon the Syrians have little or no concrete reason to stay.

Ergo, the editorial writers are a bunch of nitwits, homers, and simple dolts.

[independentchristian]

13. nm

[independentchristian]

14. What does "Democracy" in the middle east mean?

It means people who want theocracies that are anti-American and anti-Israel at their core.

How any American can think "democracy" in itself is a good thing in a region where if the wishes of the people was actually granted, this country would be blown off of the face of the earth, is a mystery to me.

What, do people believe that allowing people to vote instantaneously makes them pro-West?

My fellow americans, we live in a dumb country.