The fallibility of the ballot box and the need for patience.

Fouad Ajami, Professor of the Middle East Studies Program at Johns Hopkins U. has written clearly about the major changes that have taken place in the Middle East. Some of his points:

• President Bush realized that Arab autocracies and terror were joined at the hip and accordingly made it clear that:
  
  
  • It's no longer business as usual in the Middle East
    
  • Despotism need not be the Arab destiny.
    
  • There will be no more subsidies to terrorists.
  
  
• Palestinians to be responsible for the history and politics they make.
  
• The recent choices made by the Palestinians was in keeping with "a long tradition of escapism," the Palestinians now to be required to live with the choices they have made.
  
• President Bush correctly stated that sixty years of Western nations "excusing and accommodating the lack of freedom in the Middle East" did not make us safer or purchase stability; that where there is no liberty in the Middle East there will only be "stagnation, resentment and violence for export."
  
• Modern liberalism sneers at the idea of Arab freedom and has faith only in the authoritarianism of Arab culture.
  
• Messy, sloppy political compromise will still be necessary in the new Iraq and the elections were not a mandate for theocracy.
  
• In the past the West granted the Arab world an"absolution from the laws of historical improvement" and ceded to it a "crippling exceptionalism."
  
• America has shaken up the Arab world and broken "the pact with tyranny."
  The ballot is not infallible and unfortunately can be cast in favor of Arab atavisms and against the secular "bandits and pretenders" [but with a result that favors Hamas].

Mr. Ajamis concluding point is excellent:

We have given tyranny the patience of decades. Surely we ought to be able to extend a measure of indulgence to freedom's meandering path.

Now, would someone please call the Colonel and explain -- just one more time -- why George Bush is a moron.

The Promise of Liberty." By Fouad Ajami, Wall Street Journal 2/7/06.