Liberated Iraq is progressing, and the first real signs of prosperity are already visible:

It’s the Iraq you don’t hear about, one with falling unemployment, rising wages, lower interest rates and higher foreign investment. While the war-torn country is still struggling politically, economically it’s taking off. Businesses are opening, shops are full of merchandise and there’s a lot of hiring and investing going on. The transition to a free-market capitalist system is underway.

...U.S. and foreign aid are turning Iraq into a massive public works project, and while the nation isn’t yet a model of private enterprise, the work done to date has given many Iraqis a better life.

William La Jeunesse's caveat is a good one. Public works projects are socioeconomic morphine injections; they alleviate short-term pain in emergencies, making endurance from one day to the next possible. But in great quantities over longs periods of time works projects numb entrepreneurial instincts, upset the balance of reward and risk, and stunt the growth of the private sector - creating what we know as the modern welfare state. See France, Cascading Economic Failure of. For the truly destitute, like Iraqis - who have been left stripped of nearly every free market institution, tool and trust by Saddam - such strong measures are necessary in these early months to help the country gain its feet. A powerfully capitalist Iraq is very much in America's philanthropic and strategic interests. Eventually, Iraqis must be weaned, for their benefit as well as ours.

THE GOODS IN BASRA: British magazine The Sun is reporting on the economic and municipal successes in that southwestern Shiite city. Specifically, 300 new and used cars entering the city daily; electricity for twenty-three hours instead of the two hours given by Saddam's regime; teacher's wages have risen 1300%; hospitals, law enforcement and fuel services are all gaining size and strength. Life for Iraqis is still filled with risks and uncertainties; but they are undoubtedly thankful. So what will we hear from the reactionaries who give us their Yes, buts, telling us that Saddam could have been removed "at some other time"? Remember: two Iraqs. Two Basras. One suffered under the thumb of Saddam; the other has a future to build with its own free will. Can the stubborn opponents of Iraq's liberation - the people who are still fighting last year's political battles - face the institutionally violent, hopeless Iraq and Basra that would still exist today had they stayed President Bush's hand? Probably not, hence the Yes, buts. I fear they will always serve an abstract "humanity" rather than people, struggling but determined, in the flesh.