"....
There are many questions ahead. And I don't mean to minimize them. But I'm struck by some of the paradoxes of all this. We're too close to events to see them clearly. But the timing of this strikes me as fortuitous. Why? Because by the time of the elections, the insurgents had been able to show themselves as a real threat to the democratic experiment and to reveal their true colors - enemies of democracy, Jihadist fanatics and Baathist thugs. The election was in part a referendum on these forces. And they lost - big time. Their entire credibility as somehow representing a genuine nationalist resistance has been scotched. If the election had happened earlier - say a year sooner - it might not have registered the same impact, because the insurgency would not have been so strong or so defined. Failure and success are not always binary in history, or mutually exclusive. Sometimes early success - like the liberating war - can aggravate the problems of an occupation. And sometimes failure - like losing control of security across whole swathes of the country - can lead to unexpected success. These are my provisional thoughts (sorry, Mickey). And they may be infused with a certain euphoria (sorry, again). But providence does seem to be at work in these events. Miracles do happen. One just did. "

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