Eccentricity of Japanese culture notwithstanding, this may be a crucial social development to aid Iraq's progress:

A television drama that became a hit in Japan 20 years ago will be supplied to an Iraqi broadcaster free of charge as part of the Japanese government's efforts to support people in the country during the rebuilding process there, it has been learned.

The drama, "Oshin," will be supplied to Iraq's IMN television station through the Japan Foundation, the Foreign Ministry, which has jurisdiction over the foundation, said.

"We hope that people seeing the life of a Japanese woman who overcame various difficulties to survive a tumultuous period will offer encouragement during the period of rehabilitation after the war," a ministry official said.

No one - least of all the White House - has claimed that reconstruction would be easy. It hasn't been in the frustrating early months, with Ba'athist holdouts and foreign terrorists trying to thwart the transfer of power to the Iraqi people; and it won't be in years to come. If the security and stability of modern liberty is to become a part of the country, many mores and traditions - some of them hung over from Saddam's brutal rule, but no less habitual - will be displaced or discarded. The choices of moral conduct, finally reserved for the individual, will leave an impression of rampant, unprecendented immorality. Industrial upheavals will occur; social classes accustomed to living off of the Party will finally face the uncertainty that exists even among abundant opportunities, and previously oppressed minorities will run headlong into at least some lingering aspects of bigotry and segregation.

Iraq writhes in the agony of birth now. In the next decade or so - perhaps longer because of its morbidly dysfunctional neighbors - it will slog through a sort of teenage depression; a painful reassessment similar to that which the Germans and Japanese each placed on themselves throughout the 1950s. Granted, Iraqis will benefit from their relative innocence from Saddam's crimes. The guilt of tyranny won't be theirs as much as it was for the millions actively following Hitler or Tojo and his militarists. But America will only be of so much use to strengthen the confidence of Iraqis to overcome decades of terror and the shock of rebuilding a country, brick by brick. If any nation can show them the way through direct experience, it's Japan.