some optimism on Iran/Iraq

Here are a couple of good reports which suggest some grounds for optimism in facing down the enemies of freedom in Iran and Iraq. Those who dismiss out of hand the possibility of success from the American liberation of Iraq should, but probably won't, read these. Taken together, they paint a picture which is credible and begins to justify the enormous cost and effort of the US in the region.

From Amir Tahari in the Jan 31 edition of the Washington Post:

"That at least part of the Khomeinist leadership might want ways to defuse the situation is not surprising. The sanctions, though nothing more than a gentle rap on the knuckles, have already started to bite - with a disproportionate psychological impact on some players in the Iranian economy. Iranian businessmen see the measures as a kind of aperitif for a deadlier main course to be served later."

And from Fouad Ajami (John Hopkins University):

"The truth of Iraq will assert itself on the ground, but the age of Sunni monopoly on power has passed. One of Iraq's most respected scholar-diplomats, Hassan al-Alawi, has put the matter in stark terms. It is proper, he said, to speak of an "American Iraq" as one does of a Sumerian, a Babylonian, an Abbasid, an Ottoman, and then a British Iraq. Where Iraq in the age of the Pax Britannica rested on an "Anglo-Sunni" regime, this new Iraq, in the time of the Americans, is by the logic of things an American-Shia regime. The militant preachers railing against the fall of Baghdad to an alliance of the "American crusaders" and the "Shia heretics" are the bearers of a dark, but intensely felt conviction. We should not be apologetic, in Arab lands seething with bigotry and rage, about our expedition into Iraq. We shouldn't fall for Arab rulers who tell us that they would have had the ability to call off the furies had we had in place a "process" for resolving the claims of the Palestinians, and had we been able to "deliver" Israel. Those furies have a life of their own: In truth, they are aided and abetted by these same rulers in the hope of tranquilizing their own domains and buying off the embittered in their midst."