In the flurry of reports leaked, fingers pointed and accusations launched we should remember that the least immediate and expedient justification for liberating Iraq is nevertheless the strongest, by far the most relevant to the war on terror and dictatorship — and that justification is the recreation of Iraq as a pluralist, democratic state with a society dedicated to the same ideals as America and its allies. Only recently was it reported that the moderate Islamic clerics of Najaf, Iraq are quickly gaining authority to turn the city into a regional cynosure of Shiite teaching and influence. Mullahs in Iran are likely not the only ones in fear watching the grip of fundamentalism and terrorism on religion and culture loosen, a paradigm shift that began only after Saddam Hussein could no longer repress Iraq's religious majority. On videotape, Iraqis emulated the macabre stage show of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi to mock the terrorist leader, bear witness to Zarqawi's crimes against their countrymen and call for his death. And despite car bombings and gunshots, Iraqi men and women volunteer in droves to help rebuild or defend a new nation. For better or worse, Iraqis have fulfilled the prediction that challenges to their new way of life would only stiffen their resolve. That they — unlike foreigners who have become either fat on their freedom or unsure of its worth — will not only resist the devil but deliver a rabbit punch to his neck. The arm is already being drawn back.

Glenn Reynolds links to the latest evidence of failure by the Near East's culture of death to swallow Iraq:

Al Qaeda operations in Iraq have encountered unexpected problems. Iraqis have become increasingly hostile to al Qaeda's suicide bombing campaign. Religious leaders, which al Qaeda expects to get support from, have been openly denouncing these bombings. Iraqis, aware that they are more likely, than American soldiers, to be victims of these attacks, are providing more information on where the al Qaeda members are hiding out. Most of the al Qaeda in Iraq are foreigners, and easy for Iraqis to detect.

...Al Qaeda has found the atmosphere even more hostile elsewhere in Iraq, and many of the terrorists have returned home.

What appears as a rebirth or miraculous change of heart by the Iraqis is simply the natural response of a society freed, protected and guided towards civility. Following the lead of President Bush, the Allies have in one stroke eliminated an enemy state and turned it into a likely ally. When the president speaks of liberty and peace, he is describing a strategy far more practical than the old reactionism of his opponents' "stability over democracy." As technology inexorably advances, the free world — always under threat from dominative forces — faces annihilation by the direct or indirect consequences of authoritarianism left organized as states or cultures. Its only hope is a Kantian "perpetual peace," a world where freedom is ubiquitous. Evil — at its core the love of self and from there, want, hate and malice — would remain but be contained. From my essay, A Democratic Paraclete, "Founding Freedom to Excise Tyranny":

Disease, as a consequence of human existence, can never be destroyed; only its particular strains. It is the same with the rule of force. Manifestations can be cordoned off and choked, as [President Franklin] Roosevelt initially sought. They can be fought and defeated, as Roosevelt, then Harry Truman, and Churchill finally accomplished.

More effectively, a body can be protected from disease through inoculation. Again, it is the same with the rule of force. For each patient nation, as it were, the antibody not only protects it from easy infection — from within or without — but serves as a foil to the disease of bestial will. If a disease can neither infect nor spread, it will first lose its warrant of mortality — before a practical disappearance.

The skeptic will call this this daydreaming. But where is the Third Reich? Where is the Rising Sun? The Soviet Union's Eastern Bloc? Gone; defeated and their roots crushed as compost for a new creation utterly unlike the old regime, the old way. Modern history's list of horrors is matched by its uncanny redemptions. Today the Germans, Japanese and East Europeans would as soon return to rule of the strong as we, so why would Near Easterners be different?

We see that they aren't. President Bush, if he wants, will be able to assume a powerful moral advantage over his philosophically uninspired opponent, John Kerry. As the Iraqi character continues to emerge, I question the interest of the Democratic candidate's supporters in the rights of men when their ticket plays a double-game of ridiculing the invasion as unnecessary and brushing off the needs of the helpless by vote ("I actually voted for the $87 billion before I voted against it") or by thoughtless stump line ("We shouldn't be opening fire stations in Baghdad while closing them in Brooklyn"). How much longer before one foreigner is worth exactly one American, that the discrepancy between "all men" created equal within American borders is settled for those beyond? In the current Democratic platform — the sentences that begin with "It's good that Iraq is liberated" before the conjunction "but" — I see a belief of senescent utility, many decades and wars old, that grows only frailer. All the same, the president's higher goal should be to advance the argument of peace through freedom not only for his reelection but for all time, for all of mankind.