The Allies continue to hammer insurgents in Iraq. While exposed Ba'athist-terrorist operations in Fallujah are greeted with precision-guided bombs, aerial reconnaissance revealed just what al-Sadr's hapless and despised criminal lot think of Imam Ali's "holiness." Baghdad has issued another ultimatum. With fortune, their position has improved to deliver a credible promise of overwhelming, decisive force.

LIFE IN BAGHDAD: All the while, Iraqis enjoy freedom — and peace. Omar, enjoying fine Iraqi cuisine, puzzled over the discrepancy between his experience and the one being broadcast by most journalists:

You sit in a restaurant like this one and see families relaxing with their children playing and having fun late at night and you feel that there’s ‘something’ wrong in the way MSM is dealing with the Iraqi issue. I watch TV and I see hell breaking around me then I go outside and see enough normalcy AND progress to make me believe that the people in the media are not here to report how’s life going but rather they are here reporting pre-prepared stories and to be faced with something that contradicts the picture they have in their minds would be really annoying and will mean more hard work to try to find the truth or something close to it.

Leftism, never fond of the individual, finds its key to short-term victory in obfuscating, distorting and otherwise denying miraculous triumphs of the downtrodden. What else remains when ideology trumps practical reason? Now, there's hardly anything dedicated leftists detest more than America as America or military action. Just imagine what they'd do when faced with American-led military force ensuring peace by liberating the Third World — and slowly succeeding. Have an idea? In fact, we've already found out: leftists decided to drop the Third World from their list of concerns to better oppose us.

God knows how anyone can claim philanthropy while heckling Iraqis' and Afghans' baby steps. Back on earth, the façade can go on only so long before public audiences realize that the peace and harmony carefully drafted by the left tolerates the failure of liberal democracies. Dreamlike, if it weren't so vile in its implications. And like all other double-binds, the self-inflicted damage is not likely to be pretty.