Mick Hartley

Michael J Totten – Yeah, we won in Iraq… 

Iraq will always be Iraq, and the country could fall apart again, but the wars against Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party regime and the various radical Islamist terror militias is over. Who would have thought a few years ago that Iraq would be stable while the rest of the region is boiling?

…links to Walter Russell Mead's mildly triumphalist Memorial Day essay. Whatever you might think of celebrating a victory which arrived at such a high cost, it's easy to sense the pleasure Mead will have taken in writing his piece, after years when anyone daring to suggest that the war in Iraq might have been worthwhile was simply inviting contempt:

The story of Iraq has yet to be told. It is too politically sensitive for the intelligentsia to handle just yet; passions need to cool before the professors and the pundits who worked themselves into paroxysms of hatred and disdain for the Bush administration can come to grips with how wrongheaded they’ve been.