What a Georgia Youth and Iraq Have in Common

Never Give Up, originally uploaded by ddbsweasel.

A Georgia youth, jailed for haveing had oral sex with another teen, has been released today. He says he 'Never gave up hope.' Lord knows, his state needs him. Did Clinton or Monica come from Georgia? Why weren't they jailed, too?
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Meanwhile, in Iraq, where the Democrats gave up long ago, all the major signs are that Mr Bush's policies have worked. as Bartle Bull writes
"The question is whether the war is winnable and whether we can help the winning of it. The answer is made much easier by the fact that three and a half years after the start of the insurgency, most of the big questions in Iraq have been resolved. Moreover, they have been resolved in ways that are mostly towards the positive end of the range of outcomes imagined at the start of the project. The country is whole. It has embraced the ballot box. It has created a fair and popular constitution. It has avoided all-out civil war. It has not been taken over by Iran. It has put an end to Kurdish and marsh Arab genocide, and anti-Shia apartheid. It has rejected mass revenge against the Sunnis. As shown in the great national votes of 2005 and the noisy celebrations of the Iraq football team’s success in July, Iraq survived the Saddam Hussein era with a sense of national unity; even the Kurds—whose reluctant commitment to autonomy rather than full independence is in no danger of changing—celebrated. Iraq’s condition has not caused a sectarian apocalypse across the region. The country has ceased to be a threat to the world or its region. The only neighbours threatened by its status today are the leaders in Damascus, Riyadh and Tehran."

Mr Bolt adds
"Professor John Wixted agrees with most of the analysis, and has more.

From the media coverage in Australia, you would find it hard to believe that any of this was really happening. Ditto from Kevin Rudd’s apocalyptic pronouncements.

Iraq is being won, however painfully, and most of your media never saw this coming. Nor, I suspect, did they want to. And perhaps the main reason it has been won is that George Bush was in the White House, and stayed there just long enough to see this through. Bartle’s analysis, which appears in the superb Left-wing magazine Prospect, makes that much clear, even if it avoids mentioning Bush’s name."