How Is This For Wishy-Washy?

Whose opinion am I about to riducule for being completely weak-kneed and timid? Why my own of course.

In the newspaper rundown on the Iraqi election I came upon the following in a piece by John Podhoretz in the New York Post, Vindicated. In it he takes Fareed Zakaria to task for his out of control ego.

In another jaw-dropping display, Fareed Zakaria soberly informs us in this week's issue that Iraq's democratic evolution is probably doomed because — get this — it isn't proceeding according to a plan he outlined in a book he published two years ago.

No, I'm not kidding.

"No matter how the voting turns out," Zakaria wrote, "the prospects for genuine democracy in Iraq are increasingly grim . . . In April 2003, around the time Baghdad fell, I published a book that described the path to liberal democracy . . . In Newsweek that month, I outlined the three conditions Iraq had to fulfill to avoid this fate. It is currently doing badly at all three."

Whoa, better stop the vote counting, Omar! You Iraqis aren't following the Zakaria Plan! Tell you what — I'll go to my dentist's office and send you an old copy of Newsweek from his coffee table so that you can get yourself right with Zakaria.

But if you go and look at Zakaria's piece, Elections Are Not Democracy, you can see that he makes some valid points. What he fears for Iraq is that after the political formation process has ended Iraqi democracy will look more like a Russian or Nigerian "democracy" than a democracy that doesn't need to be put in quotation marks.

At the same time, I still think Zakaria's categorical statements about the still unfolding process in Iraq leave him somewhat open to the charge of egotism leveled by Podhoretz.

I wouldn't feel so stupidly wishy-washy if I could just label one of them a complete jerk and end it there.

Thanks a lot guys.