Bad moon rising?

I like the modesty with which liberal Fred Kaplan acknowledges that perhaps the Iraq campaign has had a transformative effect on the region - and that the president deserves at least some credit:

It's a huge stretch to view these uprisings as a seamless wave of democracy; but it would go too far in the other direction to see them as strictly discrete events, each unrelated to the other. The evidence suggests that we're seeing at least a stream of wavelets; that the participants in one country have been inspired to take action, at least in part, by the example of participants in other countries.

I'm not one of those guys who believes "Reagan ended the Cold War," but it would be churlish (not to mention poor history) to overlook the fact that dissidents in Roumania, Poland, and the Soviet Union drew inspiration from Ron's best Clint Eastwood moment, the tear-down-this-wall speech (a speech whose timing dovetailed almost perfectly with the release of a wonderful Billy Ocean album of the same name!).

Mindful of the efficacy of past American expeditions to make the world safe for democracy, still a believer that the Iraq campaign was poorly executed but necessary, I remain cautiously optimistic.