As I said yesterday, angry mobs are angry mobs - all passion, no sense. And Iraqis, like Zeyad, know the score:

The reaction of the Shi'ite margi'iyah wasn't a surprise, blaming the coalition. First they ask coalition forces to keep out of the holy sites and stay as far as possible from the festivals, and when something goes wrong they are the first to blame for not providing adequate protection. I'm wondering why someone didn't wisely proclaim 'It was the joooz, you know', or maybe they did and I haven't noticed.

...The shameful silence must end. Where are the cries of outrage from the Arab and Islamic world? Where is the condemnation and denunciation? Where are the fatwas? Where is the seething and shaking fists? Or are these preserved for other people?

The loudest voices of the Near East, of course, are those of dictators and their appointed mouthpieces. The message they send is that only the unfree - the masses of people too ignorant or fearful to disagree - are considered worthy. Iraqis are discovering ways to express themselves that aren't instructed by the state or drawn simply from prejudice. Iraqis rejected rule of the strong and its romanticized nonsense about caliphs and holy warriors when they pulled down the statue of Saddam and vandalized his hundreds of public portraits. In their struggle to live as free, peaceful and enterprising people in the months since, Iraqis have become untouchables to the culture of the oppressed and hateful; authoritarianism, with its secular and theocratic thugs, cannot succeed in free societies. Worthless to the deranged cause of domination and slaughter, the free people of Iraq can never enjoy peace with dictators or the people dictators oppress. They must instead defeat their enemies, terrorists and despot regimes alike; militarily, with the help of Western armies or, more peacefully and perhaps more appropriately, through culture itself.

When I wrote briefly about the second strategy, I had hoped that Iraqi livelihood - its education, its markets, its prosperity - could grow in the face of security threats. Granted, less than one year has passed, and remarkable steps have been taken towards rebuilding Iraq and rejuvenating its society; neither the Japanese nor the Germans faced the kinds of active, paramilitary threats Iraqis do, and yet both Axis countries were very much in disarray one year after V-J and V-E day, respectively. Things may yet move ahead despite the risks of terrorism. And I still believe that liberalization is a far more potent poison to authoritarians than military force alone. But the Iraqis, the Bush administration and the allies need to consider just how causally Iraq's security and the existence of terrorist-supporting regimes next door are related. Iraq may not be able to help the Near East escape from its backwardness unless more of the region is taken from the clutches of terrorists and strongmen.