Good news for a change

Must read from a non partisan, well respect analyst.  It's nice to finally read something more than the usual quagmire, vietnam, and retreat analysis.  Let's hope the message gets out a little more...

Polls in the United States may show that Americans have become less supportive of our efforts in Iraq...But the Pew polls in these Muslim countries demonstrate that those attacks have moved Muslim opinion against the terrorists and toward democracy...

This is not to say that everybody in these countries has good things to say about the United States. But we are not engaged in a popularity contest. We're trying to construct a safer world. We are in the long run better off if Muslims around the world turn away from terrorism and move toward democracy, even if we don't like some of the internal policies they choose and even if they don't have much affection for the United States.

Two generations ago, Americans, at the cost of hundreds of thousands of deaths, changed minds in Germany and Japan. The Pew Global Project Attitude's metrics give us reason to believe that today's Americans, at far lower cost, are changing minds in the Muslim world.