In a long article excerpted below, The Guardian newspaper, a bastion of hard left British Socialism, which had vehemently opposed the Iraq war, describes the "silver lining" of the current flowering of freedom in the Middle East. They also have some advice for their fellow travelers. Even if they can't bring themselves to admit they were WRONG, this is evidence that not all leftists are completely irrational.
Guardian Unlimited Guardian daily comment The war's silver lining: Tony Blair is not gloating. He could - but he prefers to appear magnanimous in what he hopes is victory. In our Guardian interview yesterday, he was handed a perfect opportunity to crow. He was talking about what he called 'the ripple of change' now spreading through the Middle East, the slow, but noticeable movement towards democracy in a region where that commodity has long been in short supply. I asked him whether the stone in the water that had caused this ripple was the regime change in Iraq.
He could have said yes, insisting that events had therefore proved him right and the opponents of the 2003 war badly wrong. But he did not.
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But if he had wanted to brag and claim credit - boasting that the toppling of Saddam Hussein had set off a benign chain reaction - he would have had plenty of evidence to call on.
Most immediate and dramatic is the flowering of what looks like a Cedar Tree Revolution in Lebanon - a mass demonstration of people power on the streets of Beirut to match the Orange revolution last December in Kiev. After nearly three decades of living under Syrian influence, and 20 years of partial military occupation, tens of thousands of Beirutis have taken to the streets waving Lebanese flags - united in their desire to send the Syrians packing.
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Elsewhere in the region, the ripple of change has been quieter but no less significant. In Egypt, Hosni Mubarak stunned his people at the weekend when he announced that presidential elections later this year will no longer have just one name on the ballot - his. Multi-candidate elections are promised, though whether these will be free and fair seems more doubtful.
Equally hard to rely on is Saudi Arabia's round of elections this year and its promise that women will be able to take part - not this time, but next. Britain and the US also take satisfaction in Libya's decision to abandon its attempt to build weapons of mass destruction and Iran's recent promise to halt production of enriched uranium. It's not as if these countries have undergone some ideological conversion: rather, they're hoping to get America off their backs. (Mike note: Would President Kerry be pursuing such a policy???)
The big prize - the one the prime minister was so keen to show off at his London conference yesterday - is progress in the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. After four years of stalemate and worse, the Palestinians are now led by a man who describes those who murder Israeli civilians as "terrorists" and who seems serious about putting the Palestinian house in order.
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it cannot be escaped: the US-led invasion of Iraq has changed the calculus in the region. The Lebanese protesters are surely emboldened by the knowledge that Syria is under heavy pressure, with US and France united in demanding its withdrawal. That pressure carries an extra sting if Damascus feels that the latest diplomatic signals - including Tony Blair's remark yesterday that Syria had had its "chance" but failed to take it and Condoleezza Rice's declaration that the country was "out of step with where the region is going" - translate crudely as "You're next".
Similar thinking is surely at work in the decisions of Iran and Libya on WMD and Saudi Arabia and Egypt on elections. Put simply, President Bush seems like a man on a mission to spread what he calls the "untamed fire of freedom" - and these Arab leaders don't want to get burned.
This leaves opponents of the Iraq war in a tricky position, even if the PM is not about to rub our faces in the fact. Not only did we set our face against a military adventure which seems, even if indirectly, to have triggered a series of potentially welcome side effects; we also stood against the wider world-view that George Bush represented. What should we say now?
First, we ought to admit that the dark cloud of the Iraq war may have carried a silver lining. We can still argue that the war was wrong-headed, illegal, deceitful and too costly of human lives - and that its most important gain, the removal of Saddam, could have been achieved by other means. But we should be big enough to concede that it could yet have at least one good outcome.
Second, we have to say that the call for freedom throughout the Arab and Muslim world is a sound and just one - even if it is a Bush slogan and arguably code for the installation of malleable regimes. Put starkly, we cannot let ourselves fall into the trap of opposing democracy in the Middle East simply because Bush and Blair are calling for it. Sometimes your enemy's enemy is not your friend.
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