Let's not all fall off our chairs just yet, but this headline in the Guardian over an article by Sir Max Hastings, of all people, made me do a triple take:

'Perhaps the neocons got it right in the Middle East We should not be blinded by liberal prejudice when assessing Bush'

Wow! Things must really be bad (ie, good) for Hastings to be swerving off his tank-tracks like this. Sir Max, let us not forget, has been hurling thunderbolts and pouring torrents of bile and vituperation over the Iraq endeavour from the start. Yet now even he is being given pause for thought:

'A friend who visited the White House recently described the president's buoyant account of his Iraqi crusade, which highlighted the fact that a national government has been formed. Some progress is claimed towards normalisation in Shia and Kurdish regions. Syrian withdrawal gives Lebanon a chance of making something of democracy. Washington asserts that it is involving itself more than ever in the Middle East peace process.

'None of these claims should be dismissed out of hand. The greatest danger for those of us who dislike George Bush is that our instincts may tip over into a desire to see his foreign policy objectives fail. No reasonable person can oppose the president's commitment to Islamic democracy. Most western Bushophobes are motivated not by dissent about objectives, but by a belief that the Washington neocons' methods are crass, and more likely to escalate a confrontation between the west and Islam than to defuse it.

'Such scepticism, however, should not prevent us from stepping back to reassess the progress of the Bush project, and satisfy ourselves that mere prejudice is not blinding us to the possibility that western liberals are wrong; that the Republicans' grand strategy is getting somewhere.'

'

Mere prejudice

?' Good heavens, old chap, whoever could possibly think such a thing? '

Our instincts may tip over into a desire to see his foreign policy objectives fail

'? Don't you just love that little weaselly 'may'? Surely 'may tip over' is a typo which should have read 'have tipped over'? And how good of him to be so even-handed, even if it has taken two years -- and even if it doesn't quite make it to the end of the piece where there are the usual swipes at 'Palestinian subjection' and 'simplistic' neocons. Nevertheless, compared to what has come before from this particular armchair general, it is a model of rational discussion -- from someone who is beginning to grasp that he may just have been stranded on the wrong side of history.

Posted by melanie at May 4, 2005