Democracy is a process

Jim Hoagland's piece on Lebanon today puts words to a frustration of mine that is at least a year-and-a-half old:

Exaggerated optimism about Iraq -- mine included -- gave rise to post-invasion bitterness and exaggerated pessimism inside and outside the administration. The overreaction -- the swift, continuing alternation in perception between "success" and "failure" -- obscured the need for a speedy transfer of responsibility to Iraqis and helped delay elections there. The political runways in Iraq were overshot, successively, in opposite directions.

For the better part of a year, the knuckleheads at ESPN argued that every insurgent attack, every dead Iraqi or US soldier proved that the war in Iraq was a failure. Not failing, but failed. Meanwhile that view ignored every evidence of improvement--slight or substantial. Viewed through Hoagland's words, the fact that things did not proceed as planned (which is rule #1 of war: No battle plan survives contact with the enemy) meant failure.

Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit offers definition to my rebuttal of the knucklehead-view: AS I KEEP SAYING, democratization is a process, not an event. What the knuckleheads did was proclaim a result before the process was finished.

Viewed through Reynold's words, all the pieces add up to positive movement and a policy that is succeeding, though not yet a full success. Meanwhile, there's still time for the knuckleheads to understand the difference and support whats begun in places like Iraq and Lebanon.