Excuse Me For Being A Conservative Prick

How can we not root for Bush to win this campaign for Arab democracy, even if his chances still seem no better than even? And while celebrations are premature, shouldn't we sometime Bush-bashers -- and even the full-time Bush-haters -- be prepared to give great credit to him and his neocons, if and when it becomes clear that they have engineered a historic breakthrough?

We could still, of course, assail Bush's continuing claims of near-dictatorial power. (May the Supreme Court continue to save him, and us, from his worst instincts.) We could still trash the policies that we don't like. We could still back a good Democratic nominee (if available) in 2008. We could still debate whether Bush is smarter than we thought, or just lucky.

But no matter how shallow, slippery, and smug Bush sometimes seems, if he ends up changing the world for the better, he will be entitled to a presumption of wisdom, even brilliance. Bush's soaring rhetoric about "ending tyranny in our world" rang hollow to me on January 20, amid all the grim news from Iraq. Then came Iraq's January 30 elections and the freedom ferment around the region. So when Bush spoke again of ending tyranny in a March 8 speech, the grandeur of his aspirations seemed more in tune with reality. The Arab spring has many causes, of course. But the big one was Bush's removal of Saddam.