Today Christians and others celebrated Christmas across the world. In and around Baghdad, Eddie Coyote played Santa Claus in fatigues, caused a little mischief that'll be best lost in translation, and made note of the Iraqi capital's inexorable public and commercial growth despite uncertainty, crime and terrorist sabotage. "Healing itself," he said.

No better day to remind ourselves of those things equally miraculous and wonderful.

Michael Ledeen, laying it down:

You cannot have it both ways. If Zarqawi is indeed the deus ex machina of the Iraqi terror war, it cannot be right to say that the "insurgency" is primarily composed of Saddam's followers. Zarqawi forces us to think in regional terms rather than focusing our attention on Iraq alone. Unless you think that Iraqi Defense Minister Shaalan is a drooling idiot, you must take seriously his primal screams against Iran and Syria ("terrorism in Iraq is orchestrated by Iranian intelligence, Syrian intelligence, and Saddam loyalists"). Indeed, there has been a flood of reports linking Syria to the terror war, including the recent news that the shattered remnants from Fallujah have found haven and succor across the Syrian border. Finally, the Wahabbist component carries the unmistakable fingerprints of the quavering royal family across the border in Saudi Arabia.

The terror war in Iraq was not improvised, but carefully planned by the four great terror masters (Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Saudi Arabia) during the infuriatingly long run-up to the liberation. They made no secret of it; you have only to go back to the public statements of the Iranian mullahs and the Syrian Baathists to see it, for top Iranian officials and Bashir Assad publicly announced it (the mullahs in their mosques, Bashir in a published interview). They had a simple and dramatic word for the strategy: Lebanon. Assad and the mullahs prepared to turn Iraq into a replay of the terror war they had jointly waged against us in Lebanon in the 1980s: suicide bombings, hostage-taking, and religious/political uprisings. It could not have been more explicit.

The contention that terrorists in Iraq are primarily local, ethnic, tribal and/or Ba'athist serves both leftists who wish to prove Iraqis want nothing of democracy or American guidance, and some traditionalists and pragmatists on the right who believe their own intellectual investments are at stake.

The enemy as a force organized in advance by Saddam is a political cudgel against the military and sociopolitical optimism of progressive moral rightism in the American Enterprise Institute and much of the senior Bush administration, particularly Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. The enemy as a response to an American presence is a tool for anti-Americans, totalitarian sympathists, and petty critics of the liberation, who tend to project disdain for the freedom they enjoy onto those who are obviously struggling to hold and keep it themselves.

As the face of an ancient rivalry, the enemy fulfills the theories of traditional rightists like the otherwise cogent Charles Krauthammer, who stubbornly believes in sectarian rigidity; while supportive of the liberations of Afghanistan and Iraq and prospects elsewhere, he remains fashionably skeptical of our ability to inject pluralism into dictatorial societies, notwithstanding the prime nation-building examples of Germany and Japan. A year ago he considered Afghanistan a matter of preventing the return of Islamist rule and little more, a cautious appraisal I initially entertained before firmly discarding it as the Taliban grew visibly weaker and weaker while Kabul liberalized. His response to the country's electoral triumph in October was that "factions were exhausted," when in fact they were active until driven into obscurity by Allied and Pakistani forces. Now he contends that Iraq is currently in a "civil war," one driven by Sunni statists. While Krauthammer's faith in democracy remains comparable to pro-liberation rightists, his insistence on other personal theories — like the specious argument for preserving the dysfunctional hammer of terror known as the old Iraqi army — in effect endorses a fanciful "better than awful" standard that undermines the case for and implementation of assertive democratization.

The "civil war" case is a shoddy one. Despite the geographical location and ethnicity of most terrorists, there is neither an internecine crisis nor a political one. Sunni parties that were no less terrorist faceplates than Sinn Fein departed Baghdad's consensus during operations in Fallujah but many more remain a part of the accelerating election process and threats of boycotts have been weak when not quickly rescinded. Even the United Nations believes electoral non-participation to be insignificant. One cannot have a civil war without an organized secession led by a rival established power; in Iraq, there is nothing of the sort, but instead reasonably broad polity across the country. And what of the Sunni element in terrorist acts? It is believed that the enemy has numbered more than 10,000 and active terrorists no more than three thousand. Counting all 10,000 as Sunnis, who comprise one-fifth of Iraq's population, but two-tenths of one percent of Sunnis are represented — whereas the American Confederacy enrolled twelve percent of the South's total population. The standard for which Krauthammer's argument requires is low, though certainly reaching a level of the absurd.

True reactionaries (Krauthammer is not, thankfully, included here) further hesitate to see in Iraq an assembly of opportunist criminals and professional killers left over from the Saddamite regime fused to a non-statist invasion — one that is nevertheless led by states like Iran and Syria — because it confirms that Iraq's liberation is a beachhead and the proper beginning to a showdown with authoritarians who are indeed at war with us, rather than a sideshow or a distraction.

The counter to terrorism in Iraq as regional war is anecdotal evidence that shows a majority of captured and killed terrorists to be Iraqis. Possibly, but then why the anecdotal evidence showing measurable support and primary direction from Islamofascist-supporting regimes whom Iraqis — especially Sunnis — should despise? And even if members of the terrorist invasion were once Ba'athists, wouldn't they, by virtue of joining with those judged to be vermin by the tenets of Arab Socialism, cease to be Ba'athists? The only functioning Ba'athist regime in the Near East is Syria's — how I intend the word when I use it — which only strengthens Ledeen's point.

The good people of Iraq are very deliberate when they condemn the killers and saboteurs around them as "no Iraqis."

Recent attacks committed by terrorists against Iraqis and Allies clearly indicate only two things: one, that organized killers are in Iraqi cities and two, that they will take murder any way that it comes. Those who fell while mourning in the south and eating lunch in the north did so in relatively large numbers; and the mess hall attack in Mosul has by numerical measurement earned itself the title of, to paraphrase, "the most deadly single attack on American troops since the beginning of the war." In headlines, these combined body counts are dispiriting to supporters of Iraqi freedom and useful for naysayers and assorted Fifth Columns. As Wretchard notes today and I have been repeating, this is asymmetrical warfare up front: give stateless authoritarians physical access to an open society and they will nestle in to carry out random horrors in the hopes of destroying the trust, honor and common good of free men from the inside out, with the intention of dominating them when suitably weakened. That, and nothing else, is what evil drives a strongman to do.

But neither attack demonstrates any newfound or troubling strength on the part of the enemy. Just a handful of terrorists were necessary for each act and neither was followed by additional strikes to press advantage. The Near Eastern funeral procession is by definition a mass of people; situate a single powerful explosive anywhere near it and the death rate is high. It's not at all the same thing as a large number of coinciding deaths of empowered, well-protected individuals in Iraqi or Allied political and military ranks. Back in the summer and fall, we would read daily reports of Baghdad citizens cut down by a mortar shell, the equivalent of four gang members running around New York City near rush hour firing rockets in every direction. They were painful personally and to a lesser extent politically but an expression of the terrorists' strategic weakness: not feracious, just feral. John Allen Mohammed and Lee Boyd Malvo frightened the Beltway with their killing spree but did nothing to shake the foundations of the free states of Maryland and Virginia, nor that of the District of Columbia. In Iraq, a country barely two years from an unbroken history of compulsory rule, with a population that for thirty years learned like good victims of Stalinism to look the other way, and a fledgling police force that often must beg for the public common good taken for granted in the established free world, clandestine butchers will get away with a good deal more. But for how long?

Analysts, including Retired Lt. General Robert Scales who spoke on Special Report with Brit Hume last night, recognize the attack on Task Force Olympia as an incredibly lucky hit — rocket or bomber — both in terms of location and concentration of targets. It came on the heels of no less than six victories by Iraqi police and army forces in Mosul, and provoked what could likely be heavy losses for the terrorists who seem to have chosen the city as the ledge on which to cling. Critics like to make Mosul more than that, but Mosul is not like Fallujah and Fallujah is rebuilding after being thoroughly shaken out. Maybe terrorists will bounce back and forth, says the other side. Maybe, but with markedly fewer every time, having done nothing to prevent increasing stability in three-quarters of Iraq nor the country's first free elections.

The tactic of hit-and-run enjoys more romance than it deserves. A favorite of an inferior force — and the away-stands crowd for America's enemies — hit-and-run's purpose is defeated if it invites the destruction of that force, especially if the force tries to hide amongst people who only tolerate its presence out of a fear that slowly ebbs. Pricking a giant enough will leave you in no condition to noticeably bother anybody. Ask the Taliban and Muqtada al-Sadr.

Tough terrorist luck continues in Mosul:

Iraqi Security Forces decisively defeated another attack by anti-Iraqi forces as they attempted to seize a police station. In a separate incident, Multi-National Forces from 1st Brigade, 25th Infantry Division (Stryker Brigade Combat Team), detained five people suspected of anti-Iraqi activities during other operations on Dec. 17 in northern Iraq.

An Iraqi Police station came under attack by indirect and small arms fire during a coordinated effort by insurgent fighters to overrun the station in central Mosul. The Iraqi Police successfully repelled the attack denying insurgents access to the station. This is the sixth time since Nov. 10 where insurgents have tried but failed to overrun police stations.

Like any cowards, anti-democracy thugs seem best able to hurt children, civilians and the unsuspecting. Tellingly, much of the elite press is infatuated with them.

But Iraqis and Allied soldiers don't answer to journalists. Reconstruction continues (here and here), and the country is preparing for elections, fifteen of eighteen provinces reported as ready. Iraqis don't believe foreign or domestic critics who, for the twenty-third time in nearly as many months, are warning of civil war. In Najaf and Karbala, a powerful show of courage from citizens as mourners paid their respects publicly, likely near or at the same sites of Monday's attacks on processions.

THE ENEMY: Apparently they mustered enough loins to land indirect fire on an American base's dining facility. (It's strategically insignificant, so one wonders if terrorists are changing tactics, after six thwarted police station attacks, to capitalize on the American left's attempts at politically pressuring the Bush administration). The son of my councilman, with whom I went to high school, is based in Mosul; I'll keep an eye and an ear to news. Abrupt and disappointing as the news might be, keep in mind that this is war news. If you wake up every morning with the hopes that no American deaths or failures will be broadcast, you will become very despondent very quickly. The answer is not to ignore sad news; the answer is to remember that while terrorists continue to attack American troops and Iraqi democrats, the country of Iraq moves forward. In the same Google News thread feeding early Mosul reports, I found this story about rebirth in Sadr City. As always, only doubt can bring us down.

ABOUT COURAGE: Omar and Mohammed clarify some details of their stateside visit and their brother Ali's decision to stop blogging on Iraq the Model. Again, it is suggested that Ali believes his efforts to help Iraq are best directed elsewhere.

In light of events over the past several days, this is news we need to hear:

Iraqi authorities detained 50 suspects in connection with an explosion in the Shiite holy city of Najaf that killed at least 54 people and wounded 142, and thousands of mourners attended funerals for the victims on Monday.

Pessimists and liberation opponents are usually driven to assign blame for these attacks to American and Iraqi authorities. But make no mistake: Iraq, and to a lesser extent, Afghanistan, are prime examples of terrorism point-blank, a full-throated, viral onslaught against an open society. There is no longer any Saddamite Mukhabarat, no network of informants, no Babylonian Big Brother tracking every citizen and holding an impenetrable monopoly on the methods and execution of strength through fear. In today's Iraq there is an Allied military force with far-reaching intelligence capabilities but one that inherits the limitations of freeborn men — that is, the inclination to leave most people in peace and quiet — while the Iraqis themselves must welcome the enfranchisement of life based on law and trust but bear its vulnerabilities.

What is apparent from this report and one from Mosul, detailing yet another series of foiled attempts by terrorists to overturn a democratically minded government, is that while Iraqis are not nearly at the full sense and confidence of that new nation they are certainly not helpless. If two-and-a-half score can be arrested within twenty-four hours of a crime, by Iraqis themselves no less, while community leaders mock the perpetrators' obvious designs on internecine strife, the bombing failed. The statement made by terrorists, "You are not your own masters," receives a reply: "You can kill us here and there, but for only so long before you never will again." To make sense of this battle in Iraq, a landscape of subversion that terrorists would rather be right outside of your own front door, we must understand the next six months in terms of that conversation.

PERSPECTIVE: Keep in mind that despite these horrific, high-profile attacks, terrorist activity in general is down to a fraction of what it was before Fallujah was cleaned out, and that there is an entire country rebuilding around local tragedies. From Sadr City to Fallujah to encouraging words from none other than Afghan President Hamed Karzai, Arthur Chrenkoff has more.

Innocent civilians murdered because they wish to change their government peacefully and popularly — it's all that the terrorist insurgency inside Iraq knows. Good for Fox News calling it what it is on its main page: desperate measures. These killers should have learned that, after bombing Iraqi police recruits only to see thousands and thousands more step forward in defiance, the Iraqi people will not yield their greatest opportunity to join the free world.

Meanwhile, Ali Fadhil appears to taken more insult from paranoid American leftists more than he first let on, and is announcing that he will no longer write on his brothers' weblog. His entry, however, did hint towards a weblog of his own. Let's hope so; Ali's voice is too essential to the world's opinion of progressives in old despots' lands to go quiet.

I'm pleased journalist Steven Vincent's weblog is more compelling than his recent contribution to National Review, which is a five-part series on an American's puzzlingly slow discovery that an authoritarian nation will actually be undergirded by a brutal authoritarian culture. A read of William Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich and William Chapman's Inventing Japan neatly describes the parochial, power-based hierarchies that existed in Germany and Japan and frustrated any meaningful liberalization from the modern Weimar Republic and Meiji Restoration, respectively. Each country was lucky enough, as it were, to fall to the Allies and face both swift and forceful American reform. But the point is that like all dysfunctional families, despotisms are fundamentally the same: unfit for the rule of law until the strongest columns of predation can be swept aside and new foundations laid.

If there is one way in which Iraq's general society is different from the Axis countries, it is the stretch of time for which a population suffers under a dictatorship after the promises of glory and equity have been exposed as a great lie. The Third Reich and the Rising Sun were cut down only by war, in their prime: Iraq had been sitting stagnant, rotting from the inside, since at least 1988. On one hand, Iraqis suffer from easy resignation or despair. For them, living in fear is the only life they know, whereas most Germans or Japanese could look back to the Weimar or the Meiji, which — while unstable and fleeting and not so far removed from the older, harsher days — was each preferable to the violent ruin brought by the Nazis and militarists. Not so for the Iraqis; that is easy enough to tell from bloggers Zeyad or Hammorabi on their darker days.

But as I have noted before, Iraqis' wholesale disassociation from Ba'athism for nearly two decades has left them demonstrably more prepared for real freedom than the Germans and Japanese. The people of the Berlin-Tokyo Axis may have suspected defeat but not reform as it came, and were surprised. Iraqis, cordoned off from the world as they were by Saddam's regime, had nothing to gain from the slow starvation of the sanction days and nothing to lose by abandoning it, and were waiting for reform. Since it is plain that all authoritarian societies are, in each one's own way, equally unsuited for pluralist, democratic living as when first encountered by reforming occupations — and that there is nothing anomalous about the insurgency if only the relative severity of it — Iraqis should be at no disadvantage to becoming confident democrats in a time comparable or smaller than their historical counterparts. I have said often, especially since this April, that the Iraqi character and the insurgents are not of the same cloth. What better evidence to that end than a poll taken in Baghdad, where Iraqi citizens responded to more pointed acts of murder from terrorists by rejecting parochialism, tribalism and collectivism in one blow?

United States Marines distribute toys to Iraqi children in a show of goodwill. Iraqi girl hugging an American-given teddy bear stops a convoy in order to expose a landmine in their path. Read it here.

Could the insurgency in Iraq be sinking into a Taliban-like quagmire? Terrorists seem to be losing their brutal touch:

Iraqi Security Forces defeated two attacks in Mosul by anti-Iraqi insurgents as they attempted to seize two police stations on Dec. 14, while in other operations Multi-National Forces detained 10 people wanted for anti-Iraqi activities in northern Iraq.

Two Iraqi police stations came under attack with small arms fire during a coordinated effort by insurgent fighters to overrun the stations in western and eastern Mosul. The Iraqi police and Soldiers from the Iraqi National Guard successfully repelled the attacks, preventing a reoccurrence of the events of Nov. 10 when many police stations were abandoned and later looted.

This is the third and fourth time since then where insurgents have tried but failed to take police stations, proving that the Iraqi Security Forces are growing stronger each day.

Military leaders were right from the start when they referred to the enemy as "dead-enders."

Perhaps it's not quite news that Iraqi Defense Minister Hazem Shaalan is calling Iran and Syria out for the ruling regimes' attempts, through subterfuge and outright terrorism, to obstruct Iraq's democratization and carve the country up for themselves. Shaalan made similar statements in July and August of this year, and he's doubtless expressed more of the same. Good for him. Iraqi sympathies for the terrorists responsible for murderering hundreds of civic participants and innocent bystanders have always shown to be insubstantial, even in the Sunni Triangle, where fear and uncertainty appears to dictate day-to-day loyalties more than any sort of conviction. There is no "civil war," as an intellectually posturing Charles Krauthammer is currently claiming, but what has always been suspected: a witches' brew of former Ba'athist operatives, from commanders to secret police to Saddam's Sturmabteilungen, the Fedeyeen; foreign terrorists, including al Qaeda agents, whose tactics' adoption by Saddamites so quickly after major combat ended should prompt one to more closely examine the interchangeability of two ostensibly disparate groups; criminals, who were released by the thousands shortly before the Allied race to Baghdad; and foreign agents sent by neighboring powers, including Iran and Syria.

The latest batch of grim diagnoses seem drawn up out of boredom more than anything else. The most difficult test of democratic Iraqis' will came in April. That was the time for worry — many did. Authoritarians failed to destroy the new country; the lion's share of sovereign authority was given to Iraqis two months later. Now, Iraqis are concerning themselves with political competition, confusion, disagreement and uncertainty — as the Middle East Media Research Institute tells us, all the kinds of problems free societies face during every peaceful, popular change of leadership. And no amount of terrorist violence could prevent such an achievement. This hasn't gone unnoticed: Bill Kristol's and Austin Bay's reports reveal Iraqi democracy's communicable inspiration eroding the reigns of the very strongmen who seek to undermine it. An iron fist will rust.

Who's missing all of this? The left, convoluted in self-absorption beyond all intellectual and moral usefulness, and those whose misobservations confound as much as they reflect. From the Associated Press article on the Iraqi Defense Minister:

Shaalan may have been looking toward next month's polls, the first to be held since Saddam's capture a year ago.

It's been more than a year. Not once have Iraqis popularly chosen their leader in the eighty-three years since British partition. Political expression has been just as elusive. A military coup put down the Hashemite monarchy in 1958; the Ba'athists seized power in 1968 and Saddam Hussein assumed control in 1979. Dictatorships can only produce mockeries of what they import from democracies — Hussein was "president" and in 2002 he stood for an "election." But it was good enough for the AP. That the strongman's farce is acceptable to some confirms that the next decade will see two history books being written: one by those whose obsolete metric leaves them blinded to change and a second by those who divine policy from principle, and needed only to remind themselves of right three years ago.

AND: More sweeping changes in the Near East. Reactionaries will protest that these things were coming about before the fall of the Taliban and Saddam Hussein, but then it's really the duty of a poor loser to split the unexpected boon from the unprecedented action he opposed.

WHAT I BEGAN WITH: President Bush echoed Shaalan's sentiments while at a press gathering with Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. While one can justifiably complain that the Bush administration is too polite with Iraq's carnivorous neighbors, the White House is certainly growing more candid.