Feeling Confident? Reading Victor Hanson today, I am (slightly) cheered:

If on the evening of September 11th, an outside observer had predicted that the following would transpire in two years, he would have been considered unhinged: Saddam Hussein gone with the wind; democratic birth pangs in Iraq; the Taliban finished and Mr. Karzai attempting to create constitutional government; Yasser Arafat ostracized by the American government and lord of a dilapidated compound; bin Laden either dead or leading a troglodyte existence; all troops slated to leave Saudi Arabia — and by our own volition, not theirs; Iran and Syria apprehensive rather than boastful about their own promotion of terror; and the Middle East worried that the United States is both unpredictable in its righteous anger and masterful in its use of arms, rather than customarily irresolute and reactive.

Very true. It has been a whirlwind two years, and I expect a fairly convincing mandate for Bush in 2004 based on this.

But really, in the near future, the best we can hope for out of Afghanistan is an African-style quasi-democracy, tempered by a large dose of local kleptocracy. In Iraq, I suppose we can hope for Turkish parliamentarianism, but will probably get the Egyptian variety instead: aid-addicted dictatorship with some occasional elections -- the kind that take place all over the world with Jimmy Carter "observing" from the nice suite in the capital city Hyatt Regency. In Jerusalem, can we do better than Belfast? The debate over the future of Hamas right now (political party vs. terrorist organization) is a fairly obvious replay of what Sinn Fein went through -- i.e., if you want to play in the political sandbox we're building, you'll tell your friends with the bombs to dangle.

My concern, then, is that we're not on the brink of a new paradigm in the mideast; rather, that we're remaking the mideast in a cold war mold. In the cold war, a crummy anti-communist dictator was better than a check mark in the Soviets' Latin American column. I fail to see how our bargain with, say, Pervez Musharraf -- or whatever regime appears in Iraq -- is different in kind, only with Wahabbism replacing the Marxism as the ideological soup du generation for guerillas.