File This Under "Be Careful What You Wish For"

The Arab Spring isn't quite turning into a democratic autumn.   Let's recap where we're at in October:

• Tunisia appears to be moving toward becoming a radical Islamist state.
• Libya, post-Qaddafi, appears to be moving toward adopting sharia as the founding principle of its new state.
• The leader of Afghanistan, Hamad Karzai, says that he would side with Pakistan in a war against America.
• President Obama's negotiations with Iraq to permit American troops to remain in the country as a hedge against further encroachment by Iran broke apart, and Obama has decided to declare victory in a cynical political move, and bring all Americans home.  
• Egypt... well, just by way of example, it's not a crime punishable by three years in prison to speak ill of Islam.  

You get the picture.   Need we always be reminded of the wisdom of Edmund Burke, in writing about the French Revolution, and liberals of his day rejoicing at the new-found "freedom":

“When I see the spirit of liberty in action, I see a strong principle at work; and this, for a while, is all I can possibly know of it. The wild gas, the fixed air, is plainly broke loose; but we ought to suspend our judgment until the first effervescence is a little subsided, till the liquor is cleared, and until we see something deeper than the agitation of a troubled and frothy surface. I must be tolerably sure, before I venture publicly to congratulate men upon a blessing, that they have really received one.”

The world is a dangerous place.   It's even more dangerous when naive liberals are in charge.   Sure, Qaddafi is dead; sure, bin Laden is dead.   Good riddance to them.   But that doesn't mean that radical Islamist ideology isn't still moving forward around the world.   We ignore it at our long-term peril.