The governor of Baghdad Province has been murdered by terrorists but the blow should be well-absorbed by the emerging democratic state and a population increasingly galvanized by the naked Ba'athist-Islamist aggression against them. As one of the Fadhil brothers once put it: the new Iraq is not a linear affair, unlike Saddam Hussein's Iraq, where one man "totally dominated the regime's strategic decision making" for two-and-a-half decades. Ali al-Haidari will be missed but his work, the work of millions of courageous, hard-working countrymen, will not be stopped.
A comeuppance for thugs came when a car bomb detonated properly: nowhere near innocents, killing and maiming only its terrorist occupants. (The injured terrorist will receive medical care from the Allies, far from what they'd get in return.) In Mosul, even children defy their old Ba'athist enemies and new Islamist ones, leading Allied troops to a significant weapons cache. Soldiers destroyed munitions and a truck bomb, setting saboteurs back another league. Terrorists, desperate to gain a foothold as in Fallujah by removing focal points of law enforcement, failed again. (That should make it thirteen failures since November 10, 2004.) Desperation may turn to panic, as reinforcements from the 82nd Airborne and Iraqi commando divisions have begun joint operations in Mosul, suggesting that a steel-toed sweep of the city might be on order before January 30th.
Finally, reconstruction continues apace:
Soldiers from Company A, 426th Civil Affairs Battalion, brought electricity to a village in northern Iraq. The village of Alkishki is a small rural community of approximately 250 located in the mountains of northern Iraq. The people live in mud hut homes and make their living primarily in agriculture.“It’s remarkable to me that a small group of Soldiers can come visit our village one day and within weeks improve our standard of living,” said one village elder, Said Mohammed. The new electricity will now allow the village school to operate all year long, even during the winter when daylight hours are shorter. For the first time in many of the villagers’ lives, their homes will have power.
The success of Iraq is happening; you're just not likely find it revealed by journalists.