My Weekly Standard arrived today, and after dinner I read Executive Editor Fred Barnes' observations from his trip to Iraq; it's excellent, soberly optimistic, and well worth your time. After spending a couple of pages enumerating the daunting technical, military, cultural and logistical difficulties faced by the Allies, Barnes sets them into perspective:

I've dwelt on the bad news. The truth is the difficulty with Iraqis--their whining, their ethnic squabbling, their anti-Americanism--hasn't diverted Bremer from his relentless nation-building. He knows the Iraqi attitude problem can't be solved overnight. And while the security environment here is dodgy, the only downside of terrorist attacks on the creation of a new Iraq has been to discourage foreign companies from rushing in with large-scale projects. In short, the American intervention is so powerful and all-encompassing that it overshadows everything else. It is strongly led by Bremer, well organized, and undaunted. The CPA has spread teams of experts, academics, administrators, bureaucrats, and consultants throughout the restructured Iraqi government and private sector. Visit the new central bank and they're there. Travel to Kurdistan and you'll run into them.

I didn't understand the breadth of the effort until I noticed a press officer's list of phone numbers of senior advisers in various fields. The fields were agriculture, standards and quality control, culture, displaced persons, education, electricity, environment, finance, foreign affairs, health, higher education, housing, human rights, industry, interior, water, justice, labor, security, oil, public works, planning, religious affairs, science, trade, transportation, youth and sports, Baghdad, civil affairs, governance, Iraqi media, oil policy, infrastructure, private sector, and strategic communications. Amazing.

The article ends on a proper note of uncertainty: as it should be, Iraq's future, particularly as American influence wanes, will be the sole purview and responsibility of free Iraqis. The people of Iraq will not, however, be for want of sturdily established civil foundations. From the seamless introduction of a new currency, to the revitalization of southern ports, to lowering the country's unemployment rate to a fraction of its height under Saddam, the American and Allied effort could not have been much more sweeping or generous. If Barnes is right, our new friends in liberty should have everything they need by July.

For more reflection on the approaching anniversary of the fall of the Ba'athists, read Mohammed's latest transcriptions of 2003 journal entries.