A shout out to the Bread Villain and the Puppetmaster: how France helped us without really trying.
Sheesh. I get slammed at work for a couple weeks and all hell breaks loose while I'm away, and for a change the news is good.

Saddam's capture: Really good news.
Kadafi's newfound desire to be our pal: Really, really good news.

Kadafi, evidently concerned whether Libya or Syria (both current members of the Axis of Evil Junior Varsity) would get the big promotion now that the head rat in Iraq has been nabbed, decided to eliminate his nation from the running for the coveted #3 position when the new Axis of Evil rankings come out next year. It would be really extraordinary for Kadafi, who's been mostly (though not entirely) below our radar lately, to be pulling our leg on this one, just to provoke us by embarking upon the very path just concluded by Saddam; his intent seems genuine and legitimate from where I sit.

Why the sudden change of heart? And why would this be potentially even better news than Saddam's capture?

It's not likely that the scales have suddenly just fallen from Kadafi's eyes, rendering visible the wrongness of his prior sponsorship of terrorism, pursuit of WMD, and export of weapons and weapons technology. Likelier that the reputation of the United States among Arab nations has already undergone a dramatic shift, which may be a manifestation of that elusive "reaction of the Arab Street." Likely the French have actually helped us here, though certainly not intentionally, by shouting their shrill and repetitive condemnations of our president as a cowboy and the US as a rogue nation.

The French inability to cow us into submission before their evidently awesome moral superiority and aversion to violence, despite their confident assurances to their departed pal Saddam and their best efforts to do so, have likely gotten the attention of other nasty regimes around the world. Not all of them are necessarily properly afraid yet, but they should have noticed by now that only the Brits have any real ability to influence us once we get an idea into our cowboy heads, and that they're on our side anyway in most of these dustups so far. And they should certainly have noticed that the idea infiltrating our cowboy mentality these days is to go take the fight to our enemies, whomever we perceive them to be.

The French have done us a great service in making clear just how uncontrollable we are these days, even when self-proclaimed "great powers" do their utmost to dissuade us. So, I give here a heartfelt and genuine thank you to the pusillanimous de Villepain and his puppetmaster Chirac. You've both been quite helpful despite your intentions to the contrary.

American policy is once again to carry a big stick, and Libya has agreed to mend its erstwhile wayward ways as a direct result of this. Even Dean should be aware that the war he so despised has just greatly reinforced our ability to negotiate peace on favorable terms with the Arab world. Negotiations with, say, Iran which are not backed up by credible threat of force amount merely to asking really nicely for the mullahs to give up on their nuclear programs just because they're such swell pals of the US and lovers of democracy. It should be obvious that approach won't actually work.

[Yes, I'm aware that the Iranians are actually Persian, not Arab, strictly speaking. Let it go; I was on a roll.]

Update: As usual, Stephen den Beste over at USS Clueless has a couple of insightful posts on this matter.