YAY!... Does this mean what I think it means??? (WMD)... Ken you make a great WILLisms.com Christmas elf by the way! I like it when you post stuff.

It's good news for sure, but it's very limited good news, isn't it?

We're talking about a country that, while lacking all the WMDs they were supposed to have, was and is absolutely awash in conventional weapons.

A handful of people won't die on account of this, and that's good. But it won't affect the larger reality of Iraq going to hell in a handbasket to be named later. (We don't yet know if the handbasket will be Islamic theocracy, civil war, kleptocracy, division into warring states with a combination of the above problems, or what. But Iraq is spinning towards outcomes that combine violence and corruption, and the only thing that seems to be clear is our inability to improve circumstances there.)

It seems to me that Iraq is spinning more towards democracy than civil war.

It seems that way to me too!...

Dudes: Iran has an elected legislature, too.

It takes more than that to be a democracy.

I'll stop by in six months or so, and we can chat about the progress.

Keep pessimism alive RT!

Its all you've got.

Y'know, it's funny, Stephen Hadley, the National Security Advisor, just made a speech a day or so ago, warning about the dangers of Iran and how it could destabilize the region.

Just think, you guys have finally created an ally for the Ayatollah's boys. (Yes, I know, Khomeini's been dead for years, but his revolution unfortunately lives on.)

Pessimistic? Sure. But you Republicans manage to justify it every time. Remember the summer of 2003, when you guys could at least try to fool people into believing that downtown Baghdad was no worse than, say, Bed-Stuy or Anacostia? Remember Bremer trying to bring privatization and the flat tax to Iraq? Back then, people could at least fool themselves temporarily that it might make a difference. That was then.