"What did you do in the war, daddy?"

I feel sorry for people like David Corn who have put themselves in such a box that they de facto are rooting for failure in Iraq, no matter how much they deny that. This is the fate of the modern fuddy-duddy liberal who was formerly in the “cool” position and now finds himself allied with most reactionary forces on earth just because he loathes George Bush on stylistics. Yes, that’s what it seems to come down to. What a brutal historical joke.

Meanwhile, these men on the scene have much more to tell us than the entire Congress and Beltway pundits (Nation or National Review) rolled into one:

I think the worst scenario we can have is a religious She’at domination but this is not likely to happen considering the current facts; the UIA will certainly fail to achieve the number of seats they got last time and their ambitions cannot exceed the 90 seat-ceiling (140 last January).
From what we saw and heard so far, the results of the elections In general will be pretty much similar to what we had expected in this election preview from ten day ago.
It is now a fact that many other parties are willing to show more flexibility and unite their efforts to face the UIA especially because they know now that no one list can confront the UIA alone.
The next couple of weeks are going to be very interesting and full of activity.

Although the liberal and secular powers aren’t yet ready to take the lead for a number of reasons related to 35 years of oppression and destruction but still, the progress they made in a very short time is impressive and I think their main duty now is to establish balance with the religious parties during the coming four years and I believe we already have a partial balance but the next round of election will witness a gain for the liberals and seculars over the religious.

Anyway, from taking a look at the history of nations and in a simple comparison between Iraq and experiments in other countries I think Iraqis have the best record in making substantial progress in a short time in a tough environment.

UPDATE: Mark Steyn helps “liberals” to define themselves:

George Clooney, the matinee idol, made an interesting point the other day. He said that “liberal” had become a dirty word and he’d like to change that. Fair enough. So I hope he won’t mind if I make a suggestion. The best way to reclaim “liberal” for the angels is to get on the right side of history – the side the Iraqi people are on. The word “liberal” has no meaning if those who wear the label refuse to celebrate the birth of a new democracy after 40 years of tyranny. Yet, if you wandered the Internet on Thursday, you came across far too many “liberals” who watched the election, shrugged and went straight back to Valerie Plame, WMD, Bush lied.