Why Bush will win in November

William Kristol has an excellent article in the upcoming Weekly Standard that provides some badly needed perspective on events in Iraq and elsewhere. As he correctly points out:

We are actually winning the war in Iraq, and the war on terror. We're not winning either as thoroughly or as comprehensively as we should be. Still, it is a fact that one year after the invasion of Iraq, Saddam and his regime are gone; a decent interim Iraqi government is taking over; we and the Iraqis have not suffered a devastating level of casualties; the security situation, though inexcusably bad, looks as if it may finally be improving; Moktada al-Sadr seems to have been marginalized, and the Shia center is holding; there is nothing approaching civil war.

Kristol, who is one of the dreaded "neoconservatives", has been more than critical of the Bush Administration for how it has handled affairs in Iraq. Yet, his essential point, IMO, holds true:

One sensible but conventional journalist wrote last week, "Can anybody seriously argue that, knowing what they now know about the unfolding of events in Iraq, the allies would willingly do the same thing again?" I think the answer is yes. And I think the American people will answer yes in November. They'll answer yes because they aren't really going to believe that we would have been better off to have left Saddam in power in Iraq. And the American people aren't really going to believe that more focus on first responders, and less on removing brutal dictators and changing the Middle East, is the right way to fight the war on terror.