Andrew defends W

With an accent they can understand, Andrew Sullivan defends President Bush from the London protesters in a Sunday Times piece: London Calling. Good Stuff!

Afghanistan? We have just seen a new constitution unveiled which both embraces Islam and protects religious minorities and women. If it weren't for Bush, the Taliban would still be in power. Iraq? One of the worst tyrants in history has been toppled, 300,000 mass graves discovered, the marshlands of Southern Iraq are coming back to life, the Kurds and Shia can plan democratic futures, and Bush's policy is still declared a disaster because a few thousand remnants of the old regime, combined with other regional terrorists, are still fighting! The notion that this policy has already failed relies on so raising the bar of success that only a miracle would pass muster. Come back in five years - the only reasonable time period by which to judge Iraq's reconstruction - and we'll talk. Meanwhile, some $20 billion of aid money is coming from American pockets to rebuild a country devastated by totalitarianism. And the architect of this astonishing act of humanitarianism is compared to Hitler in the streets of London. It makes no sense. None.
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So I hope the protestors enjoy their days of rage. Dictators have come and gone in London - from Assad to Mugabe in recent times - and the protests have been minor and sporadic. But a man who, for all his faults, has actually liberated more Muslims from terror and oppression than any human rights group on earth, will be pilloried, attacked, booed and maligned. He'll be fine. So will Blair. Both are idealists - one in favor of turning Iraq around for liberal internationalist reasons, the other a reconstructed conservative with a "neo" now fastened to his front. But for differing reasons, they have both arrived at the same conclusion: to have their eyes not on the passing hysteria of crowds or the snap judgments of pundits, but on the difficult acts of responsibility and persistence that history eventually judges. And judge it certainly will.