They hate us for our liberties. And for embracing freedom, they hate the Iraqis, too:

Iran has been using Hamas and Hizbullah as part of plans to impose Teheran's authority in Iraq.

A report by the New York-based Hudson Institute said Iran has been sponsoring and cooperating with a range of Shi'ite insurgency groups in an effort to develop a power base in Iraq. The Shi'ites have been employed to work against U.S. interests and intimidate independent figures within the majority Shi'ite community in Iraq.

"Following the removal of Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq, the Iranian clerical dictatorship has mounted a covert effort to establish an allied Shi'a Islamist extremist regime in Iraq," the report, by senior fellow Constantine Menges, said. "Iran has been preparing to do this for many years and has recruited political, military, and covert agent assets among the hundreds of thousands of Shi'a Iraqis who fled Iraq and have lived in Iran for years."

The report said Iran has tried to dominate Iraq in several ways. Menges cited Iran's use of Iraqi Shi'ite clerics, the establishment of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, the cooperation with Shi'ite cleric Moqtada Sadr and the use of Hizbullah and Hamas for insurgency attacks on Iraq.

"Engaging" Iran is folly; under totalitarian rule, the country is a sad contradiction, run by terror-master mullahs who step on their pro-Western, pro-democratic population. Helping to properly train and arm Iraqis will help (the Soviet Union armed a dictatorship, now the United States arms a democracy). But Iraqis' future as a free people is tied to that of their neighbors.

GAUNTLET'S DOWN: Iraq's defense minister accuses Iran of its well-known crimes.

I'd say our Iraqi friends at Iraq the Model are in rare form today but Ali, Omar and Mohammed are always a cut above the rest. Read as you can.

Why is Jonah Goldberg so charitable to thoughtless political opportunism from the left? That's a question I can't answer. Where I can assist is to rebut a specious, manufactured scandal that's been freshly minted by the thug-loving wing of the British press, one that is now peddled by those eager to win a presidential election — even it means technically taking the word of Saddam Hussein over an American president, a British prime minister and the general worldwide consensus.

Leftist British paper Observer has charged Tony Blair with making a false claim: Blair is quoted in the November 20, 2003 USAID publication entitled Iraq's Legacy of Terror: Mass Graves that "[the Allies have] already discovered, just so far, the remains of 400,000 people in mass graves." The quote was apparently repeated by Blair on December 14, 2003. And that, from the looks of it, is the substance of the charge, from which some are drawing absurd conclusions by conflating those statements with all public testimony on the subject and from there, toying with the idea of Saddam Hussein's twenty-four-year massacre as just another fabrication by George W. Bush and Tony Blair.

I find two immediately apparent flaws with this accusation. First, the USAID pamphlet continues beyond Blair's quotation:

United Nations, the U.S. State Department, Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch (HRW) all estimate that Saddam Hussein's regime murdered hundreds of thousands of innocent people.

Wait — what is that word? It's "estimate." Quite unlike "discovered." By November, 2003, nearly 270 mass graves were estimated; less than one-sixth had been confirmed. Several thousand bodies had been discovered. Four entities offered guesses, not physical accountings, on how many murdered Iraqis might lay underground if their broken bodies had been dispensed with in an orderly manner and not, say, run through a plastic shredder to preclude the need for a grave. The numbers ran between 250,000 and 300,000.

Right from the start, Blair's statement was incorrect, an erroneous number of bodies that hadn't even been exhumed. How it found its way into the USAID pamphlet or the prime minister's list of talking points, we can't say for certain. He was mistaken. But his error did nothing to undermine the estimates of bodies in mass graves. John Kerry called United Nations envoy Lakhdar Brahimi "Brandini" not once but twice. Should we have expected Lakhdar to change his name? Was Kerry lying? No, it was a misstatement that demonstrated Senator Kerry's unfamiliarity with a man's name; again, we can join in speculation on what it meant for Tony Blair to be so confused about Saddam Hussein's victims in the first weeks after the reports were released. But that doesn't turn the Baghdad dictator's crime into a White House-Downing Street swindle.

There's more. Twelve days before the USAID pamplet was released, on November 8, 2003, the Associated Press published this story:

As many as 300,000 Iraqis killed during Saddam Hussein's 23-year dictatorship are believed to be buried in more than 250 mass graves found so far around the country, the top human rights official in the U.S.-led civilian administration said Saturday. Sandy Hodgkinson spoke at workshop to train dozens of Iraqis to find and protect mass grave sites that many fear could be destroyed by desperate relatives trying to dig for evidence of their missing loved ones.

Mass graves have been found throughout the country since the U.S.-led coalition deposed the dictator in April. Mass graves "tell the story of missing loved ones such as where, when and how they were killed," Hodgkinson said. "Truth and proper burial is the first step toward reconciliation."

The process of recovering and identifying the bodies, however, could take years.

So we can say with certainty that Blair's statement was incidental, and not causal, to reports on mass graves. And it's with the excerpt's last sentence that we find the Observer accusation's second flaw. It was well understood that the estimates of bodies were far from physical confirmation. There was no official confusion, other than that of the prime minister, on what had been yet discovered. [And as the latest report on reclamation states, excavation is a long and arduous process, irrespective of Iraq's unique challenges.]

This "story" is nothing more than an attempt to use Tony Blair's twice-mistaken statement as a wrecking ball on the prime minister, even the Ba'athists' murder of hundreds of thousands, bizarre libel that is not likely to settle well with Iraqis; Shiites and Kurds especially. The Observer claims that 55 mass graves have been "examined." No, that's "confirmed." Again, an enormous difference in meaning that is either negligible or inconvenient to the left. As USAID administrator Andrew Natsios said this March:

I'd also like to discuss some of the progress Iraqis are making on their own and with U.S. assistance. Across Iraq, more than 270 mass graves have been reported. About 50 of them have been confirmed as they begin to yield their tragic secrets -- the bones tell us a story of horror and shame; arms of people were bound together; skulls pierced from behind; hundreds of bodies have been discovered in long trenches.

Leaders of the new Iraq and the international community have now joined together to begin the long and painful process of accounting for the dead. In order for all Iraqis to move into their new democratic future, there must be an accurate accounting of these past atrocities. How many died in these mass murders? Some say 300,000, some say 400,000. There are estimates of upwards of a million. We are helping the Iraqis as they begin the terrible task of counting.

The many Disappeared are the most tragic victims of tyranny. Where are they all? We'll never know. We're best to believe the Survivors, and we do know what happens to those who go far to disprove what is better left to common sense. Shame on Kevin Drum for trying to wield this nonsense as a political weapon; shame on Jonah Goldberg for taking him seriously.

Euro-fops they aren't:

Thousands of Iraqis marched through central Baghdad on Thursday demanding the execution of former dictator Saddam Hussein and denouncing Islamist militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Noisy protesters waved Iraqi flags, chanted anti-Saddam slogans and held up posters depicting mass graves.

"Let every fool listen, Saddam has to be executed," "No, No to Tikrit" shouted the crowd in reference to Saddam's hometown north of Baghdad. Protesters also shouted slogans denouncing the United States, Zionism and terrorism.

"Death to Wahabis! Death to Zarqawi!" shouted several hundred people in the heart of Baghdad's commercial district, referring to a strict Sunni Muslim sect based in Saudi Arabia.

Iraqi Kurds appealed for Saddam's execution last week. (The anti-American slogans are probably the work of Muqtada al-Sadr and his henchmen, reported in more detail here, the men annoying but unpopular and now marginalized.) So Near Eastern authoritarianism slips a little bit more. Iraqis — free Iraqis — won't back down.

Weblog Iraq the Model is worth as much scrolling as time allows. Mohammed recently made a case to a relative for the current progress of reconstruction in Iraq, drawing a square kilometer and describing the scene. Meanwhile, Omar speculates on the gains made by Iraqi police sternly cracking down on crime-ridden areas:

Something that worth mentioning is that when you walk in these areas you can see pro-Saddam slogans covering most of the walls and in my opinion there’s a strong relation between ordinary criminals and the "resistance" as each group serves the other's interests; as a thief would love to see chaos spread everywhere and would make use of attacks that target the security forces because this would provide a favorable environment for his work. On the other hand, the "resistance" and their allies would like to see more crimes to prove their theory that things were better off in the past and that the change in Iraq has made things only worse. The routes through which drugs are being smuggled are most likely to be the same ones used to smuggle explosives.

Omar's got it right: desperation breeds extremism, the very lifeblood that pumps through Iraq's dictatorial neighbors, feeding hatred and violence. In Iraq, that flow is being staunched. Crime will probably be a challenge in years following the disintegration of organized terrorism in Iraq, just as it was in postwar Germany and Japan, so a powerful show of authority will go far to establish the rule of law in this early stage. But as for the present, Iraqi jaws are set, acts of barbarism doing little to shake the country's spirit.

BETTER THAN THE DEMOCRATS: Iraqi Interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi knows the score.

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.

My college friend, now Sergeant Dan Kissane of the 1st Infantry Battalion, 77th Armored Regiment of the 1st Division sent me and other stateside friends some photographs. According to Dan, the 1-77 "had a hand in Iron Saber but we weren't a permanent part, just an attachment."

All the same — thank you and God Bless, Dan. Here are four of his "ultra-neato pics":

One comment on Juliette Ochieng's Baldilocks regarding the Philippines' genuflecting to terrorist demands:

The problem, of course, is that this is just the terrorists' first demand on the Phillipines. Now that they know the government will surrender so easily, more extortion will be on the way, ultimately leading to demands that the Phillipines quit fighting terrorism in their own territory and allow use of their country as a secure protected terrorist base.

What are you talking about, David? Terrorists are level brokers who will keep their word, right? Right?

One of the obstacles the world has yet to overcome is nationalist bigotry. It's one thing to protect your own citizens, another to recuse yourself from the well-being of an entire country to avoid death — something that obviously happens quite often on the streets of the Philippines. But that's "crime," and I suppose it's all a matter of why and how. One Filipino, we can see, is in the process of being made worth more to the islands than 25 million Iraqis. The vanity is unsurprising, and perhaps forgivable, but the consequences in today's world are staggering. What would Manila do if the threat were a catastrophic weapon aimed at many more than one Filipino? At the very least, we're offered another example of how palpable the terrorist threat is in such a world of pliant leaders and peoples.

Belmont Club has more on national timidity.

The anti-liberation crowd has never been much for apologies. When their predictions of crisis, strife and calamity imploded not one week after the deposition of Saddam Hussein had begun, opponents of Iraqi freedom reorganized, concentrating on the remaining question of Saddam's weapons of mass destruction. We know the story well — a decade of shared beliefs torched, all the better to rhetorically punch President Bush in the kidneys — and receive news reports on the fallen dictator's uninterrupted obsession at the rate of about two a month. (Here and here for May, here and here for June, and an early start for July.)

Of course, that doesn't stop the left, who spent the latter part of last summer hammering the White House with the testimony of a diplomat, the inimitably hypocritical Joe Wilson. Wilson has since corrected himself — without the admission of wrongdoing, what with all that earlier talk of "frogmarching," but corrected nonetheless. Now comes the grave digger:

A UK government inquiry into the intelligence used to justify the war in Iraq is expected to conclude that Britain's spies were correct to say that Saddam Hussein's regime sought to buy uranium from Niger. The inquiry by Lord Butler, which was delivered to the printers on Wednesday and is expected to be released on July 14, has examined the intelligence that underpinned the UK government's claims about the threat from Iraq.

...The Financial Times revealed last week that a key part of the UK's intelligence on the uranium came from a European intelligence service that undertook a three-year surveillance of an alleged clandestine uranium-smuggling operation of which Iraq was a part.

Saddam Hussein wanted weapons of mass destruction — but you already knew that, unless you've been working overtime to believe something else.

They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery but in this case it's the purest form of mockery:

A group of armed, masked Iraqi men threatened Tuesday to kill Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi if he did not immediately leave the country, accusing him of murdering innocent Iraqis and defiling the Muslim religion.

...In a videotape sent to the al-Arabiya television station, a group calling itself the "Salvation Movement," questioned how al-Zarqawi could use Islam to justify the killing of innocent civilians, the targeting of government officials and the kidnapping and beheading of foreigners.

"He must leave Iraq immediately, he and his followers and everyone who gives shelter to him and his criminal actions," said a man on the video.

Far from discouraging them, the terrorist Near East has emboldened Iraqis, now even to the point of rage. In this case, I believe the behavior warranted and necessary. The natural instincts of democratic self-preservation in any liberated culture is where many of us invested our trust — indeed, the rugged Iraqi anti-terrorists have arrived. More Americans and Westerners should understand and adopt the belief that if you give a man his freedom, he'll thank you, go on his way and fight tooth and nail to keep it.