Bush's Good War

Thomas Barnett thinks the current chaos in the Middle East is a sign that the President's strategy is working:

...the strategy of laying a Big Bang on the Middle East is going amazing well.
Well, that is, if you find the notion that Hamas replacing Fatah is good and you like Hizbollah’s rise in Lebanon and the Muslim Brotherhood giving Mubarek electoral fits in Egypt--all of which, quite frankly, I do welcome...

Will that process be pretty? Sometimes yes, it will be quite thrilling, but many times no, for it will unleash a lot of social anger and age-old disputes. But again, either we speed the killing or we delay it, and I vote for speeding it because it keeps the violence overwhelmingly over there, where it belongs, along with all the social and economic and political change.

...what’s the alternative? Waiting on the alleged magical influence of “soft power”? Hoping for more modernizing autocrats in a region where none have previously succeeded (save for those tiny city-states on the Gulf)?

I agree totally! Often out of chaos comes civility. Look at the 60's or further back to the Fall of Rome. Hopefully it won't take the Arabs that long to get their act together.