Boy, you publish a short essay in TNR Online, have Andrew Sullivan, Glenn Reynolds, David Adesnik, Kevin Drum, Jacob Levy, Matthew Yglesias, and the Wall Street Journal's Best of the Web link to it, and suddenly the world is beating down your e-mail door with lots of additional information, pro and con, on the odds for democratization in the Middle East.

Martin Kramer provides a passel of links that suggest skepticism on Middle Eastern democratization, all of them from last fall. Here is Kramer's address to the 2002 Weinberg Founders Conference; an abstract of Adam Garfinkle's October 2002 National Interest essay; and a Carnegie Endowment policy brief.

On the positive side, the Oxford Democracy Forum has an excellent frequently asked questions page with lots of links on democracy and war with Iraq. Go check it out.

As for me, I think I'll take this advice for the rest of today.