Arianna Huffington:
Quick, before the conventional wisdom hardens, it needs to be said: The Iraqi election was not the second coming of the Constitutional Convention.
The media have made it sound as if last Sunday was 1776, the fall of the Berlin Wall, Prague Spring, Ukraine’s Orange Revolution, Filipino “People Power,” Tiananmen Square and Super Bowl Sunday all rolled into one.
John O’Sullivan:
[The Iraqi election]…is an event like Dien Bien Phu or the collapse of the Berlin Wall. It marks a turning point in history. It changes the future, of course, but it also changes the past.
For anyone suffering even momentary hesitation, John is right, Arianna wrong.
Badly wrong. Note Arianna’s tone, because it sums up the position in which opponents of the war now find themselves. Millions of people risked their lives to vote, but Arianna can manage nothing much better that a little dollop of flippancy. The Left is no longer in the position of mocking George W. Bush alone. To go on insisting that Iraq represents a debacle, they must mock human courage itself.