"Holy Schnikees!"

This is a recurring declaration of Chris Farley's character, Tommy Callahan in the movie Tommy Boy. Every time Tommy runs into something unexpected and surprising, he proclaims loudly, "Holy Schnikees!"

All week we've been treated to sudden realizations on the part of Bush Administration critics and opponents, that maybe Dubya, just maybe, was right about the Middle East. The most prominent was this:

NY Times: 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.

Apparently U.K.'s Guardian finds itself facing the inescapable facts as well: Even so, it cannot be escaped: the US-led invasion of Iraq has changed the calculus in the region. The Lebanese protesters are surely emboldened by the knowledge that Syria is under heavy pressure, with US and France united in demanding its withdrawal. That pressure carries an extra sting if Damascus feels that the latest diplomatic signals - including Tony Blair's remark yesterday that Syria had had its "chance" but failed to take it and Condoleezza Rice's declaration that the country was "out of step with where the region is going" - translate crudely as "You're next".

Similar thinking is surely at work in the decisions of Iran and Libya on WMD and Saudi Arabia and Egypt on elections. Put simply, President Bush seems like a man on a mission to spread what he calls the "untamed fire of freedom" - and these Arab leaders don't want to get burned.

This leaves opponents of the Iraq war in a tricky position, even if the PM is not about to rub our faces in the fact. Not only did we set our face against a military adventure which seems, even if indirectly, to have triggered a series of potentially welcome side effects; we also stood against the wider world-view that George Bush represented. What should we say now?

Though some are still fighting the cognitive dissonance. Ed Kilgore-for-Josh Marshall at TPM: This is a president and an administration that chronically refuse to accept responsibility for the bad things that have happened on their watch--even things like the insurgency in Iraq that are directly attributable to its policies. Barring any specific evidence (provided, say, by Lebanese pro-democracy leaders)that Bush had anything in particular to do with Syria's setbacks in Lebanon, I see no particular reason to high-five him for being in office when they happened.

Let us congratulate the Lebanese, not those in Washington who would take credit for their accomplishments.

The seeming willfully obtuse nature of that last quote not withstanding, it appears that critics of the Bush Doctrine, in general and specifically in Iraq, are suddenly realizing that things are different than they thought and they must re-evaluate them. It's as if the left went to bed one night and when they woke up the next morning, the whole world was turned upside down!

"Holy Schnikees," indeed!

(Hat tip for the Guardian piece to RogerLSimon via Powerline.