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I am not making this up.

The New York Times' editorial board simultaneously acknowledges the possibilities for positive outcomes in the Gulf and Mid-east -- and gives the Bush administration some of the credit.

Still, this has so far been a year of heartening surprises - each one remarkable in itself, and taken together truly astonishing. The Bush administration is entitled to claim a healthy share of the credit for many of these advances. It boldly proclaimed the cause of Middle East democracy at a time when few in the West thought it had any realistic chance. And for all the negative consequences that flowed from the American invasion of Iraq, there could have been no democratic elections there this January if Saddam Hussein had still been in power. Washington's challenge now lies in finding ways to nurture and encourage these still fragile trends without smothering them in a triumphalist embrace.

And just in case you're reeling in disbelief, they do it a second time! (Asking the administration to share top billing with local dissidents hardly seems unfair.)

For all his talk of opening up the process, President Hosni Mubarak, 76, is likely to make sure that no threatening candidates emerge to deny him a fifth six-year term. But after seeing more than eight million Iraqis choose their leaders in January, Egypt's voters, and its increasingly courageous opposition movement, will no longer retreat into sullen hopelessness so readily. The Bush administration has helped foster that feeling of hope for a democratic future by keeping the pressure on Mr. Mubarak. But the real heroes are on-the-ground patriots like Ayman Nour, who founded a new party aptly named Tomorrow last October and is now in jail. If Mr. Mubarak truly wants more open politics, he should free Mr. Nour promptly.

But, hey, they wouldn't be the New York Times' editorial board if they still weren't at least somewhat clueless.

Over the past two decades, as democracies replaced police states across Central and Eastern Europe and Latin America, and a new economic dynamism lifted hundreds of millions of eastern and southern Asia out of poverty and into the middle class, the Middle East stagnated in a perverse time warp that reduced its brightest people to hopelessness or barely contained rage. The wonder is less that a new political restlessness is finally visible, but that it took so long to break through the ice.

That can't possibly have had anything to do with our perverse desire to preserve the status quo at all costs? Could it?

Comments

[Media Hound]

Nice revisionism by the Times on US Latin America
policy, which they hated at the time.

This isn't the "newspaper of record" it's the newspaper
of revision.

They hated Reagan's Latin America policies, they hated
Bush's Mideast policies. And here they are, after the
benefits of Reagan and Bush's approach are painfully
obvious to even the casual observer, attempting not to
look silly by acknowledging these successes after the fact.

The only saving grace, is that the paper becomes less
influential with each passing day.