From everything I’ve heard and read, Ryan Crocker is a hell of an ambassador, and I’m reinforced in this view by the testimony of an Iraqi (Sunni) medical doctor in Baghdad on Michael Yon’s invaluable blog. You just can’t be well informed about the war without reading the milblogs, and Michael is absolutely unique because of the many years he has sent as an embedded reporter.

The doctor’s remarks also underline the wisdom of Fouad Ajami, who reminds us that the United States is the last best hope for the Muslim world. It is not, as some used to argue, that we need to deal with the Islamic extremists (whether the Iranians or the individual terrorist groups); we need to defeat them and bring the reasonable Muslims into the civilized world. Yes, it sounds utopian, but much less utopian than believing that the jihadis are going to get reasonable. Who was it? I think Swift, who said that you can’t reason a man out of something that we wasn’t reasoned into in the first place. Our guys are like that cardiologist in Baghdad. Or the Iraqis who sat down in Copenhagen a week ago to lay the groundwork for a civil society.