If the main question about the administration's larger geopolitical strategy in the Middle East concerns its realism and chances of success, I suppose we need to count as evidence (along with the relative success of the Iraqi election) the following items from Thursday's Washington Post.

1) Jim Hoagland's column reports on the participation of Iraqi women in the elections and now the ongoing political process there.

2) Iyad Allawi, the interim prime minister, is now vying for that position in the provisional government that will be chosen by the new constitutional assmebly. This story is important for two reasons: (a) Allawi is very forthright in sayiing that his party, while dominated by Shiites, is a secular party and openly expressing a preference for a more secular government than the one likely to be formed by the majority Shia party; (b) the jockying for position among various Iraqi parties and leaders is politics. There is real politics (as distinct from just war) going on in Iraq now.

3) Saudi Arabians who voted in the recent local elections there are evincing real enthusiasm for just voting aand this could perhaps be the beginning of a larger push for reform of that exceedingly corrupt oligarchy.

4) The new cabinet appointed by the Palestinian authority seems to be dominated by people who reject Yasir Arafat's brand of politics, which is an extremely hopeful sign for the future of any stable, moderate, representative government in an eventually sovereign palestinian state.

5) Add to these items David Ignatius's column from yesterday's Post, which quotes the leader of the Lebanese Druze militia, Walid Jumblatt, as saying "I was cynical about Iraq. But when I saw the Iraqi people voting three weeks ago, 8 million of them, it was the start of a new Arab world.... The Syrian people, the Egyptian people, all say that something is changing. The berlin Wall has fallen. We can see it."

Bush may be wrong and the strategy may yet fail, but these all seem to me to be hopeful signs.