Matt Duss buries Abe Greenwald's attempt to lay claim to the Arab Spring as a child of Bush's war:
It’s probably a devastating enough rebuttal just to note that that quote from Fouad Ajami, one of the Iraq war’s most committed cheerleaders, constitutes the entirety of Greenwald’s evidence that the Iraq war spurred the democracy movements throughout the Arab world.
This is understandable, as there is no real evidence for the claim. Arabs themselves clearly don’t agree, as all available polling shows the war to be overwhelmingly unpopular in the region. An April 2010 RAND study also concluded that, rather than encouraging reform, "Iraq’s instability has become a convenient scarecrow neighboring regimes can use to delay political reform by asserting that democratization inevitably leads to insecurity."
Examining the claim in an article back in July, the Council on Foreign Relations’ Steven Cook concluded, "It is time to put the Bush boosters’ arguments where they belong: in the trash heap of discredited ideas."
The Dish 