Tacitus, refusing to confidently believe that Iraq is Japan and Normandy rolled into one - the end of a dictatorship and the beginning of a final campaign against a culture of death, difficult and lengthy challenges both - appears to have officially bugged out.
Hopefully temporarily. We've all had our shares of panicky moments - but at some point, if we can truly claim to support the idea of fighting terror by fighting authoritarianism, we need to sit back and let those to whom we've entrusted power manage the war. My moment came. I passed the test, I'm fairly sure.
On a related note, it's sad to see that Tacitus' site is often a bus stop for nutcakes. Open a thread and read the mindboggling comparisons of hand-tied-behind-the-back American liberation with sickening malevolence of lawless terrorists. To be honest, it's unsettling to visit most days, anymore.
UPDATE: Perhaps "panic" is too strong a word. I'm willing to assign it to my gut feelings when making the entry linked above; I wasn't ready to jump out a window, but I certainly was quite capable of writing a furrow-browed entry along the lines of "Boy, oh boy, the Bush administration isn't listening to what I'm saying and they're in for it now if they don't shape up." As I said, I learned my lesson - reading about Japan, even in the sense of establishing a more realistic sense of time, helped incredibly. I've made the comparison to the proverbial Normandy before, insofar as it's dangerous to think that even though democratization must be believed to be inevitable, the region can be deloused at a leisurely pace.
UPDATE II: I followed Tacitus' link to Josh Marshall's latest observation from the left. No, no, no: as yet, a great many people are still in the mindset that the problem was not Saddam, but the weapons. No weapons, fine; we'll leave Saddam alone and, one supposes, "hunt al Qaeda." All the while, al Qaeda mysteriously sustains itself - mysteriously because as a corollary, the dictatorships in the region have nothing to do with the terrorists. In fact, that's indicative of a complete misunderstanding of what this conflict is about. It's about culture and freedom. The absence of freedom is a foothold for evil. I can't say that enough. The only way to defeat terror is to remove the machinery that is caretaker for a nightmarishly frustrated society. That means destroying Near East dictators if the worst they've got are pop-guns. "It's the government, stupid!" Making weapons the major argument is Bush and Blair's own trap out of which to wriggle; but that by no means diminishes the power of the true argument.
UPDATE III: The Allies are moving. No coincidence, I'm sure. They know what they're doing. We should all know that undertakings in that region are far more difficult than they look - especially because those of us far away do, at best, see through a glass darkly.
