A report from the Chicago Tribune tells the story of more refugees, widows and orphans - made that way care of Saddam - returning, slowly, to their old lives:

The Marsh Arabs, a 5,000-year-old tribe of fishermen-hunters who lived on reed islands and paddled swamp waterways in elegant canoes, joined the revolt wholeheartedly, and when it failed they paid a terrible price.

Bombed, shot, imprisoned and poisoned by the regime--Iraqi helicopters reportedly dropped pesticides into marshland lakes to kill fish, a tribal staple--the Marsh Arabs' population in Iraq has dwindled from 250,000 to 40,000, human-rights groups say. Tens of thousands of the nomads now languish in Iranian refugee camps.

[...]

"We broke the dams when the Iraqi army left," said Qasim Shalgan Lafta, 58, a former fisherman whose village sits marooned, along with a few cracked canoes, in a landscape that looks like the Utah Badlands. "We want to teach our children how to fish, how to move on the water again." . . .

"Thanks be to Allah for giving our water back!" declared grinning old Mutashir, one of thousands of nomads displaced by Hussein's cataclysmic reclamation projects. His dingy robes flapping about him, he hugged himself with his scrawny arms and added, "Thanks be to George Bush!"

Now imagine this scene played out in one of the hundreds of nations on Earth still untouched by justice and liberty. Univeral democracy is why America exists, boys and girls. Let's support the drive to take a step outside ourselves and help our fellow man.

(Link via Instapundit, where you can read a larger excerpt if you don't want to register with the Tribune.)