Iraq Democracy vs American Anarchy?

Instapundit's post yesterday

INTERESTING PIECE FROM NEW YORK MAGAZINE by Spy founder Kurt Andersen on the new liberal guilt:

But now our heroic and tragic liberal-intellectual capaciousness is facing its sharpest test since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Back then, most of us were forced, against our wills, to give Ronald Reagan a large share of credit for winning the Cold War. Now the people of this Bush-hating city are being forced to grant the merest possibility that Bush, despite his annoying manner and his administration’s awful hubris and dissembling and incompetence concerning Iraq, just might—might, possibly—have been correct to invade, to occupy, and to try to enable a democratically elected government in Iraq.

presses us to look at our own democracy in fresher ways, with less taken for granted. Enormous amounts of money and energy are spent on getting views out, getting candidates elected or defeated, and passing or blocking proposed legislation. It exhausts us and it exhausts our adversaries, and both sides seem to get partial victories and both sides are left partially wanting -- and that's a good thing. There is enough return and enough exhaustion for each side to keep us from killing each other.

The violence in Iraq, and Iraq's transition to politics from brutal force, begs a question of us: Have Americans been transitioning in the opposite direction? The right wants to govern with its majority, the left wants to govern like a Sunni minority -- and it takes quasi-suicidal positions that effectively invite defeat, despair and disaster at home so they can blame it on the right. As Rush summarizes the left strategy: "if it's bad for America, it's good for us."

Instapundit's post above clearly lets some of the pressure out of the right/left conflict. If the left will revisit how liberalism is about liberty and not about propping up Stalinists, that's a great step forward.