Gosh, who'd have thought the NY Times would see the light. I'm surprised
Jimcomma, or some other Times lover, hasn't already posted this:

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The New York Times
March 1, 2005
EDITORIAL
Mideast Climate Change

It's not even spring yet, but a long-frozen political order seems to be cracking
all over the Middle East. Cautious hopes for something new and better are
stirring along the Tigris and the Nile, the elegant boulevards of Beirut, and
the impoverished towns of the Gaza Strip. It is far too soon for any certainties
about ultimate outcomes. In Iraq, a brutal insurgency still competes for
headlines with post-election democratic maneuvering. Yesterday a suicide bomber
plowed into a crowd of Iraqi police and Army recruits, killing at least 122
people - the largest death toll in a single such bombing since the American
invasion nearly two years ago. And the Palestinian terrorists who blew up a Tel
Aviv nightclub last Friday underscored the continuing fragility of what has now
been almost two months of steady political and diplomatic progress between
Israelis and Palestinians.

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.

Lebanon's political reawakening took a significant new turn yesterday when
popular protests brought down the pro-Syrian government of Prime Minister Omar
Karami. Syria's occupation of Lebanon, nearly three decades long, started
tottering after the Feb. 14 assassination of the country's leading independent
politician, the former prime minister Rafik Hariri.

If Damascus had a hand in this murder, as many Lebanese suspect, it had a
boomerang effect on Lebanon's politics. Instead of intimidating critics of
Syria's dominant role, it inflamed them. To stem the growing backlash over the
Hariri murder, last week Syria announced its intentions to pull back its
occupation forces to a region near the border - although without offering any
firm timetable. Yesterday, with protests continuing, the pro-Syrian cabinet
resigned. Washington, in an unusual alliance with France, continues to press for
full compliance with the Security Council's demand for an early and complete
Syrian withdrawal. That needs to happen promptly. Once Syria is gone, Hezbollah,
which has engaged in international terrorism under Syrian protection, must
either confine itself to peaceful political activity or be shut down.

Last weekend's surprise announcement of plans to hold at least nominally
competitive presidential elections in Egypt could prove even more historic,
although many of the specific details seem likely to be disappointing. Egypt is
the Arab world's most populous country and one of its most politically
influential. In more than five millenniums of recorded history, it has never
seen a truly free and competitive election.

To be realistic, Egypt isn't likely to see one this year either. 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.

It is similarly encouraging that the terrorists who attacked a Tel Aviv
nightclub on Friday, killing five Israelis, have not yet managed to completely
scuttle the new peace dynamic between Israel and the Palestinian Authority.
Israel contends that those terrorists were sponsored by Syria, but its soldiers
reported discovering an explosives-filled car in the West Bank yesterday. The
good news is that the leaders on both sides did not instantly retreat to
familiar corners in angry rejectionism. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and the new
Palestinian leader, Mahmoud Abbas, have proved they can work together to thwart
terrorism and deny terrorists an instant veto over progress toward a negotiated
peace.

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.

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John H

"All decisions are the result of binary thinking."