Glenn Reynolds, looking at Iraq, mainstream reporting and progress in spite of it, gives us a telling quotation from Strategy Page:

One of those [Iraqis] who survived the [terrorist] blast was a national guard soldier named Qusay Hassan. He spoke with anger following the death and maiming of his comrades, and his spirit seemed unbroken.

"I will not kneel before these terrorists," Mr. Hassan said. "If I don't join the army, who is going to defend the country from the terrorists?"

That reaction serves as the singularly loudest Iraqi response to freedom: one of courage and defiance in the face of terror, one that this weblog has chronicled since April of 2003. As a qualifier in his entry, Glenn says that Iraq is not "hunky-dory." That's the problem with Baby Boomer relativist culture under which all of us — even Boomers like Glenn who understand — operate: a totally fictitious expectation of war based on, as far as I can tell, a willful misunderstanding of history. War, even war for liberty, is never hunky-dory; ever. It's painful as any other war, and either won or lost. Currently, we and our allies are winning.