No one should feel remorse or embarrassment for underestimating the vice grip Saddam holds upon the Iraqi people and the subsequent reluctance with which the relatively liberated population has welcomed us. Like September 11th's mass-murder designs, the depths to which evil men will sink are unfathomable by the sane; unpredictable. If we could foresee every atrocity, every scratching away at our understanding of human dignity we would live in perpetual fear and paralyzation. We would live as mock cattle, deprived of sentience in a terrified stupor.

In other words, we'd live like the most oppressed of oppressed people. John O'Sullivan taps into this rancid vein of the strongest's rule:

[W]hat happens when the cameras are switched off? Here is what a journalist from Arab News, Saudi Arabia's English daily, discovered when he took aside a young Iraqi man who had been chanting "With our blood, with our souls, we will die for you, Saddam" to television crews filming a Red Cross handout of food in an area under allied control. The young man later explained in private:

There are people from Baath here reporting everything that goes on. There are cameras here recording our faces. If the Americans were to withdraw and everything were to return to the way it was before, we want to make sure that we survive the massacre that would follow. ... In public we always pledge our allegiance to Saddam, but in our hearts we feel something else.

Iraqi "resistance" can be similarly explained. Iraq's regular forces are stiffened by the special security forces, in reality licensed thugs, that Saddam has recruited to sustain his regime against both popular discontent and military mutiny. Ordinary soldiers, not excluding officers, are forced into battle either with a gun at their backs or by threats to their family at home if they should fail to fight. In these circumstances surrendering may require more courage than advancing against a militarily superior enemy.

As the Arab News reporter concluded: "the people of Iraq are terrified of Saddam Hussein." And that includes the ordinary Iraqi soldier.

Those who predicted that resistance would collapse and the allies welcomed as liberators, as I did, made the reasonable assumption that this universal fear would dissipate when allied tanks came into view. But Saddam had reached exactly the same conclusion and, as the months of U.N. diplomacy dragged on, he set in place a structure of repression that would survive the mere arrival of the U.S. and British armies. He instilled in the Iraqi people a fear, rooted in the memory of how the first President Bush betrayed the Shiite uprising in Basra immediately after the Gulf War, that the liberation would be strictly temporary. He persuaded them in advance that the allies were mere birds of passage who, after an interval, would fly off and leave them to the ruthless revenge of a returning Baath party. He made them passive and suspicious of their own hopes.

Mortal fear has been a lasting victory of Saddam's authoritarian architecture and it will be a great, twisted monument for the allies to topple. In a couple of hours, I'll be addressing the so-called "winning of hearts and minds" of the Near East. On one hand, it will be a lengthy process - and, given the tenacity of evil men, a difficult one. It is altogether necessary for their sake as well as ours, however, not to mention a task we have successfully seen to completion before. Courage.