David Kay's successor is reporting in, and his initial conclusions are what many of us expected:

The new chief weapons inspector in Iraq told Congress on Tuesday that a lack of cooperation from ousted Iraqi officials was thwarting American efforts to untangle the many remaining mysteries surrounding Iraq's suspected illicit weapons program.

In the public version of testimony delivered behind closed doors to two Senate committees on Tuesday, the inspector, Charles A. Duelfer, acknowledged that American inspectors had still not found any evidence of an illicit arsenal. But he seemed less inclined than his predecessor, David Kay, to close the door on the possibility that such weapons might yet be found, saying that inspectors were continuing to pursue leads — "some quite intriguing and credible" — about concealed caches.

...Mr. Duelfer, who took charge of the search in January, said at a news conference on Capitol Hill that the picture of Iraq's suspicious activities "is much more complicated than I anticipated going in."

..."The people we need to speak to have spent their entire professional lives being trained not to speak" about illicit weapons, Mr. Duelfer said in a public version of his testimony.

That last sentence echoes a remark Fred Barnes makes in the article to which I linked yesterday:

Bremer, the Coalition Provisional Authority administrator and America's chief asset here, says Saddam's oppression was worse than the Communists' in Eastern Europe and Russia. At least there was a period of transition in the Communist countries when the terror was lifted and the rules liberalized. Iraq went from a totalitarian tyranny to an open society in a single day. That's bound to be traumatic.

And the stuff of reflexive denial and obfuscation. Never underestimate the lingering effects of emotional scars. I once read a shorthand FBI profile of the repugnant murderer James Earl Ray who, abused in childhood, had "difficulty looking anyone square in the eye; flinched when lying, as if expecting a clout."

We'll likely see more from Duelfer in coming weeks and months. For now, it looks as though David Kay's assertion that the increasing diffusion of power in Ba'athist Iraq's research sector was correct; and that, as I've said all along, the lack of WMD discoveries does nothing to disprove the volume of evidence against Saddam Hussein. And all this is beyond the fact that, weapons or not, Hussein was a danger to the world and an impedement to success in the war on terror. Read the report yourself: small uncertainties notwithstanding, the burden of proof is still on Iraq.

My Weekly Standard arrived today, and after dinner I read Executive Editor Fred Barnes' observations from his trip to Iraq; it's excellent, soberly optimistic, and well worth your time. After spending a couple of pages enumerating the daunting technical, military, cultural and logistical difficulties faced by the Allies, Barnes sets them into perspective:

I've dwelt on the bad news. The truth is the difficulty with Iraqis--their whining, their ethnic squabbling, their anti-Americanism--hasn't diverted Bremer from his relentless nation-building. He knows the Iraqi attitude problem can't be solved overnight. And while the security environment here is dodgy, the only downside of terrorist attacks on the creation of a new Iraq has been to discourage foreign companies from rushing in with large-scale projects. In short, the American intervention is so powerful and all-encompassing that it overshadows everything else. It is strongly led by Bremer, well organized, and undaunted. The CPA has spread teams of experts, academics, administrators, bureaucrats, and consultants throughout the restructured Iraqi government and private sector. Visit the new central bank and they're there. Travel to Kurdistan and you'll run into them.

I didn't understand the breadth of the effort until I noticed a press officer's list of phone numbers of senior advisers in various fields. The fields were agriculture, standards and quality control, culture, displaced persons, education, electricity, environment, finance, foreign affairs, health, higher education, housing, human rights, industry, interior, water, justice, labor, security, oil, public works, planning, religious affairs, science, trade, transportation, youth and sports, Baghdad, civil affairs, governance, Iraqi media, oil policy, infrastructure, private sector, and strategic communications. Amazing.

The article ends on a proper note of uncertainty: as it should be, Iraq's future, particularly as American influence wanes, will be the sole purview and responsibility of free Iraqis. The people of Iraq will not, however, be for want of sturdily established civil foundations. From the seamless introduction of a new currency, to the revitalization of southern ports, to lowering the country's unemployment rate to a fraction of its height under Saddam, the American and Allied effort could not have been much more sweeping or generous. If Barnes is right, our new friends in liberty should have everything they need by July.

For more reflection on the approaching anniversary of the fall of the Ba'athists, read Mohammed's latest transcriptions of 2003 journal entries.

Many press agencies are skewing the administrative transfer of Iraq's Ministry of Health from the Coalition Provisional Authority to the Iraqi public as some sort of failure. Robert Alt tells us why this is a victory:

That the Ministry of Health should be the first of the 26 public ministries to return to Iraqi control is quite an accomplishment, especially when you consider its dilapidated status just one year ago. Years of neglect had taken their toll. Maintenance was unheard of under Saddam, leaving only 35 percent of the equipment in hospitals operable. Doctors and medical students were unable to view medical journals online because of government policies that made owning a satellite dish a crime punishable by the state. And to add insult to injury, when Jim Haveman, the senior Coalition adviser, and Dr. Kudair Abbas, the Iraqi minister of health, arrived last year, the ministry building itself was completely looted. It is therefore not surprising to learn that Iraqis had come to expect little in the way of medical care.

What a difference a year makes! Saddam only provided $16 million for health care in his 2002 budget, a wretchedly low sum that should again prompt questions about how the Oil-for-United-Nations-Cronies — I mean, Oil-for-Food — program was operated. In FY 2004, however, the health budget received an enormous 60-fold increase, providing $948 million for 26 million Iraqis. At the end of the war, Iraq possessed only 300 tons of pharmaceuticals on hand. Compare this to the 35,000 tons of drugs distributed this year alone, a total that notably includes 30 million doses of children's vaccinations.

In order to qualify for transfer of authority, the Ministry of Health had to meet a number of criteria, including developing short and long-term strategic plans, establishing a budget, demonstrating a sound management system, and implementing a system of checks and balances to prevent corruption. Given the state of the ministry he inherited, these are accomplishments for which Minister of Health Abbas should be proud. And clearly he is. On Sunday, Dr. Abbas emphasized his belief that the Coalition would not have transferred power unless he and his staff had demonstrated that they were ready to exercise it. This approval clearly meant a great deal to him. But the transition was also important to him because it meant that the Coalition had not only kept its word regarding the transition of power, but had actually delivered early on its promise. Given how the press often portrays Coalition occupation, it may surprise some to hear Dr. Abbas describing his time working with Jim Haveman and the Americans as "[o]ne of the nicest things in [his] life." He summed up his feelings by saying that he now has good friends in America.

There's a tragedy we can find in news reporting from Iraq: far too much of it is lacking in detail. Journalists make broad assumptions as a matter of style. Terrorism is constantly used for dialectic ripostes to stated Allied intentions and, by way of subtle omission, often attributed to Iraqis as a whole. Little victories that one can find on a daily basis are buried under several paragraphs. In Alt's piece, we can see that the more detail to be found in a story, the more likely that story will depict an unprecedented success of free men and women against tall odds.

British troops have shut down an Iraqi newspaper for sixty days; whatever populist potential this story carries in the media is at odds with the fact that the rag was printed by the notorious Iranian-backed troublemaker Moqtada al-Sadr. The straw that broke, forgive the cliché, the camel's back? Al-Sadr's little op-ed calling September 11th "A miracle from God." (Via Winds of Change, whose war update shoud be required reading.) Those who will try to cast the Allies as intolerant, hypocritical or otherwise authoritarian ought to remember that in a nascent democracy, especially one without a permanent constitution, the freedom of expression must be closely regulated so as to keep it from falling prey to political abuses by powers dedicated to the destruction of liberties. An excellent historical example would be the squelching of the February 1st, 1947 general strike, the "2-1 Strike," in Japan. Managed by unions led by Moscow-backed Communists, the strike was intended not to increase nor defend worker's rights but to cause as much civil upheaval as possible, the desired result a weakening of both the Occupation's and the Diet's authority. MacArthur's SCAP selectively and temporarily abridged the very rights they had imported to the island and prevented the strike in order to guarantee that sincere efforts for labor rights could be preserved for the future.

By tolerating a subversive counterfeit of a popular institution, principle endangers practice; so the British have removed an independent newspaper run by men who would prefer no newspapers but their own. No word on whether al-Sadr's militia, the Mehdi Army, will be permanently disbanded as well.

Mohammed, who has been posting journal entries written during the major combat phase of Iraq's liberation, continues:

Today a friend of my father visited us. He works in a high position in the air defence command. My father started saying "you have to be more careful with those SAM missiles, they’re falling without any guidance and killing people." The man said "we do not run the system fully, we can’t let the radars work for a long time, because they’ll be targeted immediately! We just shoot these rockets without radar guidance to prove to Saddam that we are not traitors. He had put execution squads from the 'Fedayeen' in every missiles battery to watch the officers once the raids start. That’s why we fire those missiles and we know they may well cause serious damage and deaths, but we can’t disobey Saddam."

That officer was sure that this battle will bring with it the end of Saddam, and when we told him that most of the south is now under the control of the coalition forces from what we see on TV, and how the people are destroying Saddam’s pictures in Om-Qasr, we felt that he was afraid and wanted someone to tell him what would probably be the result because he was in a very sensitive position. He trusted my father’s judgment, so he came with many questions. I left them together so that he can feel free to ask without getting embarrassed.

It looks as though the question of who killed Iraqis in a Baghdad market has an answer. And while Mohammed jotted down his worries for safety and hopes for freedom from the Ba'athists, Britain's Guardian, thousands of miles away, cheered for Saddam Hussein.

Spending a few moments link-hunting just now, I happened on a prelaw student's weblog. In the course of making somewhat questionable, pro-tort statements about frivolous lawsuits, she made an offhand remark about the "Bush administration that claimed [weapons of mass destruction] were in Iraq." It's a sorry day when baseless rhetoric of the unapologetic left on WMDs - the last toehold in discourse to which they cling - has become, for some, conventional wisdom. Several months ago I wrote a lengthy challenge against claims of American and British perjury, including an explanation of the wholesale farce one must accept to believe Saddam Hussein, rather than the rest of the civilized world, was in fact telling the truth. The essay is still very relevant - but after thousands of memes thrown across print, radio, television and the internet our memories may need refreshing. In 2002 and 2003, conventional wisdom was vastly different:

Under [United Nations Special Commission] supervision 38,537 filled and unfilled munitions, 690 ton of agents, 3,000 ton of precursor chemicals to manufacture CW agents, and thousands of pieces of production equipment and analytical instruments were destroyed.

Despite these achievements, no complete accounting of the CW program has been possible, for three reasons:

1. Iraq removed CW, equipment and materials from the main site of the al-Muthanna State Establishment before the first UNSCOM inspection team arrived, and no full accounting of these materials has been forthcoming.

2. Iraq claims that it has destroyed 15,620 chemical munitions unilaterally, a fact and total that are so far unverified. Similarly, it provided no supporting documentation for 16,038 chemical munitions it claims to have discarded.

3. UNSCOM inspectors were reportedly closing in on a program for the production of VX, when the stand-off between Iraq and the UN Security Council began in the autumn of 1997. In November 1997, UNSCOM found new evidence that Iraq had developed a production capability for VX: Iraq had obtained at least 750 tons of VX precursor chemicals. (Evidence of VX production was first revealed in 1995.)

Bombshell that David Kay's pessimistic January report was, the weapons inspector was highly suspicious of Syrian involvement in the absence of WMD-related material in Iraq. He had already shown us destroyed offices and immolated documents in his October report. Said Kay in his January testimony before the U.S. Senate:

Certainly proliferation is a hard thing to track, particularly in countries that deny easy and free access and don't have free and open societies.

In my judgment, based on the work that has been done to this point of the Iraq Survey Group, and in fact, that I reported to you in October, Iraq was in clear violation of the terms of [U.N.] Resolution 1441. Resolution 1441 required that Iraq report all of its activities - one last chance to come clean about what it had.

We have discovered hundreds of cases, based on both documents, physical evidence and the testimony of Iraqis, of activities that were prohibited under the initial U.N. Resolution 687 and that should have been reported under 1441, with Iraqi testimony that not only did they not tell the U.N. about this, they were instructed not to do it and they hid material.

What does it mean? Take a look at the revelations Moammar Ghadafi has made as Libya begins surrendering its WMD stockpiles and facilities: some of the most incriminating contraband had gone completely undetected by intelligence agencies. And if, time and again, only willing disclosure can define or confirm the extent of a dictatorship's weapons research, what about the lack of red-handed discoveries in Iraq disproves the mountain of evidence weighed against Iraq for years? Very little, in fact. At the very least, the burden of proof never left Saddam Hussein.

Andrew Apostolou has returned from Iraq with a report on the progress of a reconstruction facing violence in country and irrational criticism at home. As usual, the news is better than you think.

Remember that when you protest the liberation of Iraq, chance are you've insulted most Iraqis. Says Mohammed:

Let everyone and especially the pacifists and all who opposed the coalition that what happened was an operation to free the Iraqi people and eliminate a criminal gang that does not represent any body but itself and its narrow interests and that pauses a serious danger on our country and the others.

That was not a confrontation between two nations nor it was a conflict between different convictions, it was an operation to excise a malignant tumor that was about to destroy everything.

...That was not a war for sure because now I see clearly the others around us looking forward for similar change demanding strongly what we had. They’re getting murdered by their governments while they scream to get their freedom and this is only one of the results of this operation. Now they see the difference.
It hurts my ears to hear the stupid statements about the “death of innocents” and the “tragedies” that are happening now because everybody knows that these are nothing comparable to the tragedies and losses we suffered in the past and those were for nothing.

And let them know that we’re ready to sacrifice more if that is the price needed to secure and maintain our freedom. Where were those paid off voices when we were murdered in thousands? Where were their ugly voices when Saddam used poisons on innocents?

That was not a war but a hope we were all dreaming of and we will never forget the sacrifices of the others and what they offered in the sake of our freedom.

Has the left actually listened to the heartbeat of Iraq, now or over the last year? No, and that ignorance is just more evidence that the welfare of people - their rights, their dignity, their happiness - has never played a part in the "principled" arguments of the left's. What are they protesting? From appearances, the wounding of their intellectual pride.

LIFE WITHOUT SADDAM AND THE LEFT'S REGRET: James Lileks focuses on the "fringe" left and the people who literally celebrate the destruction of America, but the mainstream left and the Democratic Party are only a few gradations away - from those who openly slur the thirty-four-nation alliance and the struggle of free Iraqis to those who toy with the idea that America, and not terrorists, should be blamed for the Madrid bombings. They all draw from the same source.

So the terrorists attacking Iraq have chosen to target defenseless innocents in hotels, have they? Militarily useless, the attacks will only succeed in driving Iraqis - most of whom have become sworn enemies of Ba'athists and Islamists - further towards remorseless extermination of the murderers trying to destroy their new way of life. Terrorists are dangerous in their fanaticism, well-financed and culturally supported inside despot nations - but they're strategically imbecilic. Their hunger for carnage, devoid of any coherent ideology some grant them, will be their undoing. All that's needed is the unflagging resolve to fight them.

God protect you, Scott. You're more right than any of us will know: the terrorists, the thugs and the strongmen - the agents of evil - will never win.