If someone were to ask you to compose the most unlikely beginning for a story from the French news agency AFP it might go something like this:

World leaders, including UN chief Ban Ki-moon and US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, on Thursday hailed Baghdad’s progress in combating violence and stabilising Iraq.

A declaration adopted by 100 delegations at a Stockholm conference said the participants “recognised the important efforts made by the (Iraqi) government to improve security and public order and combat terrorism and sectarian violence across Iraq.”

It also acknowledged political and economic progress made, and said that “given the difficult context, these successes are all the more remarkable.”

At least, that would have been a good try. The three paragraphs above are taken from a story put out today by AFP.

The piece goes on, rightly, to note the fragility of such progress. But the larger point is critical: Iraq, long written off as an unsalvageable disaster, is being officially recognized for its “remarkable” progress. And by whom? The UN and other world leaders whose respect we had supposedly squandered. The only people who need convincing that Iraq has seen extraordinary political progress are the Democrats who’ve hitched themselves to the anti-Bush bandwagon. If a Democrat makes it into the White House and is still so interested in world opinion, he or she may have to finally acknowledge that Iraq has changed. They wouldn’t want to “reinforce the sense that we stand above the rest of the world at this point in time.”

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This entry was posted on Thursday, May 29th, 2008 at 5:49 PM and is filed under Contentions. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.