Mohammed reflects on more of his journal entries from the days before, during and after combat operations to bring down Saddam Hussein and his Ba'athist regime. Read and scroll down for the next.

Nothing like a down-to-earth college friend to bring you, well, back down to earth. I sent this to Sergeant Dan Kissane some weeks ago:

I've read that the 1st Cavalry is in Iraq while recalling your belief of February deployment, so putting two and two together I'm assuming you're in the land of coffee, camels, oases and a society that calculated the distance from the earth to the moon while Europe was still phasing out old bestial pagan rituals. Take care of yourself, Dan - you're the hope for the Iraqis' future, as well as our own. Mike.

He wrote back this morning:

It is true that I'm praising Allah in the land of the oil sheiks. They've planted us in a swamp called Camp Lions where nobody likes Americans and incoming mortar rounds make Saving Private Ryan look like a mild civil disturbance. I get to watch Arab soap operas though. ("I must leave you, Haifa!" "No Ackbar, do not break my heart during this most holy season of Ramadan.") Stay cool, Dan.

Good old Dan Kissane. Man of few, even laconic - but memorable - typed words. And irrepressible spirit. I meant what I said about keeping hope for all.

More on the "impolitic" freedom of Iraqis:

Certainly Iraqis don't see the "resistance" in such a sentimental light. Public opinion of the fedayeen and Mafia-like crime lords in the Sunni Triangle ranges from anger to contempt. "Sixty percent of the Sunnis are criminal followers of Saddam Hussein," asserts Farman Hamid, director of the Office of Human Rights in Kirkuk. "They create problems in Iraq because they have no door to the future." Argues Basran shopowner Ghattan Mohammad, "This resistance' does not fight for Iraq, only for itself."

Even in prickly Baghdad, you find similar reactions. "We keep telling the Sunnis that they are not serving their people by attacking U.S. soldiers — Iraq's future lies with America," says Abdul Mashtaq, a director of the Iraqi Human Rights Organization. "We are proud to help the Americans in the Sunni Triangle," proclaims sheik Ali Nsayief, of the Baghdad Council of Confederated Tribes. "What kind of resistance' kills seven civilians for every U.S. soldier, then sabotages our electricity?" asks Samir Adil, head of the Worker's Communist Party. "Ninety-five percent of Iraqis do not believe in this 'resistance.'"

Which is striking, as any review of news headlines or photographic diaries from, say, National Geographic before the war showed Iraqi citizens mimicking Islamist terrorists, ready to die as masked martyrs for one glorious thug or another. City gents with pillowcases over their heads, children with plush AK-47s. They didn't show up to fight in March and April of 2003. And given a choice - the freedom of expression - Iraqis have overwhelmingly rejected terrorism of all kinds. We see that those prewar images were as fabricated as the left's dire predictions of humanitarian disaster. Given time, the Iraqis' anger will coalesce into a violent resolve against authoritarians; we're already hearing about it from the progressives. And where is the left? Playing make-believe, defending dying world views, pretending that Iraq's expulsion of ideologies of hatred and violence has made terrorism "infinitely more powerful." An entire country has been freed after decades of despotic torment, ready to expel their former oppressors and assume the enemy of free humanity, dictators and terrorists. And the left calls it a "disaster." Free people, allies - disaster? That's the left for us: intellectual pride first, human dignity a distant second.

STILL GOOD ON FOREIGN POLICY: Andrew Sullivan takes a snapshot of the left's only response to mortal danger: snooty, empty jargon.

One year ago final preparations for the liberation of Iraq were underway. The leaders of America, British and Spain were to convene at a summit in the Azores; not long after, a final ultimatum to Saddam Hussein was expected to be delivered - and rejected. Then, the military destruction of one of history's most bloodcurdling cynosures of fear, oppression and butchery - Saddam's Ba'athist regme, in the heart of the region's culture of death - would commence. Mohammed remembers:

Today, Friday March the 14th. 2003.

The dollar exchange price is 2550.

We’re still getting prepared for what the future days will bring with it. Just like every other Iraqi house, we had our emergency plan too. I went with my father downtown to buy a cage from the kind that is used to keep birds or hens but of course we had a different idea for that cage. Simply we’ll use it to hide the satellite receiver dish that we recently bought[,] no matter the risk[,] to keep in touch with the news not wanting to miss anything. The cage sufficiently served our purpose together with a sheet of dark nylon; the dish was successfully hidden.

...Will the world’s attempts to postpone the operations succeed? I don’t know, but I see determination and I don’t think there are surprises on the way. Postponing the operation again? This is killing me. Waiting will break my nerves down. The whole matter should be carried out fast.

The worse I hate are those human shields. I hate them for their stupidity, what peace they seek? Don’t they think for one moment about what’s happening here? We’re already dead. Whom are they defending? I don’t know.

As much as it disturbs me: they were not defending human lives nor human dignity. Saddam's Iraq murderered and violated both on a daily basis. International law was in its twelfth year of failure, toothless United Nations resolutions having exacted nothing from Baghdad but frangible promises and outright defiance. No one defended Saddam's unbelievable, unprovable claims to having disarmed; the only arguments against deposition were raised by those who believed that twelve more years of bureaucratic dithering was necessary and those who believed that Saddam Hussein reserved the right to both the possession of weapons and the tormenting of Iraq's population.

The utopists could scarcely make a distinction between America and Iraq; after all, weren't all men imperfect? Was there such a difference between democracy and Arab Socialism? Shouldn't peace, a magical peace with no terms or logical construction but one that simply fell like rain from the heavens, gain appeal? They followed a monolithic adage: that war was wrong, always, without exception. The introduction of democracies, waging war not eagerly for dominative gain but reluctantly for justice and freedom, had gone unconsidered. Moral equivocation served rhetorical consistency. Wasn't peace preferable to the horrors of war and the heartache of reconstruction, the pain of a democracy's birth? Wasn't it best to let someone else kill - even if deliberately, for the pleasure of it - rather than bloody our own hands with war and accidental civilian death?

The parochialists refused to believe that the military might of free nations could dislodge a dictator's twenty-year-old trunk and roots; they only saw half-measures and failure. Korea, Vietnam, Lebanon. Why bother? Some people were meant for misery, they shrugged. We can't change all regimes in one stroke, they argued - why should we begin now? In their minds, the Pacific and Atlantic stretched on forever, September 11th be damned. If only we kept to ourselves, evil would pass over. If only we paid less attention to systematic cruelty and diabolical scheming in the world, we could live peacefully in the bliss of ignorance. Like the old days.

And then the nihilists. We can only hope that most of them knew nothing about the horrors of Saddam's institutionalized nightmare; that when they focused their hatred towards the very nations defending their right to wrongfully accuse of the worst infractions against mankind, they did not realize how little time would pass before a similar protest in Iraq would send them to prison or worse. Some puppet-wielding paraders proudly gave it to us unambiguously: they supported the Ba'athists, right alongside North Korea's DPRK and Iran's Islamic Republic. Just like they'd supported the Soviet Union. Oh, did they ever have an "Axis of Evil" to show up the "establishment."

When the day came, these three groups stood for philosophies - and against the freedom of the Iraqi people. Their relativistic ideas wrapped around their own identities, they couldn't sacrifice comfortable beliefs to face the spine-chilling reality: appeasement had failed, hundreds of thousands had died while the West waited or looked away, and the looming terrorist threat could only be defeated through the destruction of statist tyrants. No, it was some other way, some better way, and Iraq could wait until opponents of liberation found it. When the day of liberation came, they stood against the Iraqi people. Many of them still do. The Iraqis won't forget. Will we?

THEY SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES: Spain's Socialist leader claims that Iraqi liberation was "a political error for the international order, for the search for cooperation, for the defense of the United States." Political? Of course: if intervention had been prevented the secret police, the rape-rooms, the WMD shadow programs, and the $25,000 payouts to murder-bombers would all have continued. But the appeasers' politics would have remained unspoiled - and that is most important to them.

Why are we in Iraq? Because, once freed, it's in the heart of nearly every man to fight against that which he sees as wrong. Sent a letter from a reader named Scott, who says "I hate [the terrorists] for...forcing me to look hard at every man and woman of Middle Eastern "look," and suspect something evil," Alaa responds:

No Scott, the way to fight terrorism is not to suspect every person of Middle Eastern look. [The terrorists] have flocked to our land, and the main battleground is right here. If they are beaten and annihilated here, this will deal them a mortal blow. Just give us sufficient support and we shall rid the world of them.

Welcome aboard, Alaa. We will see that our citizen soldiers give your people what they need to do just that - defeat the agents of tyranny and spread freedom.

Liberated Iraq is progressing, and the first real signs of prosperity are already visible:

It’s the Iraq you don’t hear about, one with falling unemployment, rising wages, lower interest rates and higher foreign investment. While the war-torn country is still struggling politically, economically it’s taking off. Businesses are opening, shops are full of merchandise and there’s a lot of hiring and investing going on. The transition to a free-market capitalist system is underway.

...U.S. and foreign aid are turning Iraq into a massive public works project, and while the nation isn’t yet a model of private enterprise, the work done to date has given many Iraqis a better life.

William La Jeunesse's caveat is a good one. Public works projects are socioeconomic morphine injections; they alleviate short-term pain in emergencies, making endurance from one day to the next possible. But in great quantities over longs periods of time works projects numb entrepreneurial instincts, upset the balance of reward and risk, and stunt the growth of the private sector - creating what we know as the modern welfare state. See France, Cascading Economic Failure of. For the truly destitute, like Iraqis - who have been left stripped of nearly every free market institution, tool and trust by Saddam - such strong measures are necessary in these early months to help the country gain its feet. A powerfully capitalist Iraq is very much in America's philanthropic and strategic interests. Eventually, Iraqis must be weaned, for their benefit as well as ours.

THE GOODS IN BASRA: British magazine The Sun is reporting on the economic and municipal successes in that southwestern Shiite city. Specifically, 300 new and used cars entering the city daily; electricity for twenty-three hours instead of the two hours given by Saddam's regime; teacher's wages have risen 1300%; hospitals, law enforcement and fuel services are all gaining size and strength. Life for Iraqis is still filled with risks and uncertainties; but they are undoubtedly thankful. So what will we hear from the reactionaries who give us their Yes, buts, telling us that Saddam could have been removed "at some other time"? Remember: two Iraqs. Two Basras. One suffered under the thumb of Saddam; the other has a future to build with its own free will. Can the stubborn opponents of Iraq's liberation - the people who are still fighting last year's political battles - face the institutionally violent, hopeless Iraq and Basra that would still exist today had they stayed President Bush's hand? Probably not, hence the Yes, buts. I fear they will always serve an abstract "humanity" rather than people, struggling but determined, in the flesh.

I've been following and opining on Iraq's progress towards self-rule for months, with occasional philosophical observations about Shiite leader Ayatollah al-Sistani. But who better to ask for a close look at the situation than a well-educated, progressive, brutally honest Iraqi? I e-mailed Zeyad of Healing Iraq over the weekend, asking what he thought about the politics Shiite demands placed on the Governing Council and the demands themselves, most notably the provision made for Islam. He responded yesterday:

As to the Shi'ite demands of giving a larger role to Islam in the interim constitution: It's a very worrying development, and many other secular Iraqis share [my] concern. I mean if they are only too eager to add this in the transitional law, what would happen when the time comes to write a permanent constitution?

The statement that 'no future legislation should contradict Islamic Shari'a law' is a very broad one, and as you know Shari'a is interpreted differently by different Islamic sects and even between different clerics in one sect. However, I have hope that moderate Iraqi groups and parties would stand against such a proposition (as they did with the infamous Resolution 137). Only time can tell, and things don't look clear at the moment.

Afghanistan's constitution contains a similar clause requiring a reflection of Islam in legislation. Purists worry about church intertwined with state, but I have felt fairly confident that even a mildly progressive judiciary will defer to the more prominent provisions for equity and equality in each country's constitution, allowing individual rights to trump the long arm of Sharia and theocracy. As Zeyad noted, the success of a public backlash to Resolution 137 is proof enough that liberal politics carry sway in Iraq. But his last remark - that the fate of secular governance is by no means certain - can't be taken lightly. Before it dissolves, the Provisional Authority must ensure that neither secular nor religious authoritarianism has even the slightest chance of swallowing up the country's nascent free society. Accommodating sectarian religious interests here and there may facilitate politics right now. Indeed, the larger cultural trend - apparent in Iraq and Afghanistan - is one where the rule of law cannot forthwith disconnect religion, and those societies may require a generation or more to make a distinction between dogma and natural law. But for any hope of progress, liberal secularists will need the upper hand when Iraq assumes sovereignty.

The final nail has been hammered into Saddam's coffin:

Iraq's Governing Council signed a landmark interim constitution after council members unanimously approved it Monday with a show of hands. Council President Mohammed Bahr al-Ulloum called the signing a "historic moment, decisive in the history of Iraq."

Decisive, indeed. Ayatollah al-Sistani may be audacious but he's apparently reasonable, having instructed the Governing Council's Shiite representatives to drop their objections. Between the progress towards establishing the rule of law and the flow of capital from the Pentagon beginning this week, terrorists will be fighting an increasingly uphill battle in Iraq.

Throughout the first quarter of 2003, into the early weeks after Saddam Hussein's fall, the question of Iraq's polity remained uncertain and hotly debated. Many who were distrustful of the Bush administration, in their infinite paranoia of elected, Western governments, assumed that a dictator would be plucked from Ba'athist remnants and set to watch over the country as oil deposits were bled dry. Among the sober, even the oxymoron of a pro-democratic strongman was seriously considered and suggested, Daniel Pipes and Stanley Kurtz included. Iraqis, of all backgrounds and religions, in agreement on self-government - even tentative, transitory documents? Fodder for daydreamers. Never!

How very wrong, I'm happy to say, they all were. Even in the face of religious culture impressing itself ever-so-slightly into law, and the utterly selfish boycott held by some Shiite delegates just moments before the highly publicized signing ceremony for Iraq's interim constitution, Iraqis continue to work civilly for the good of a free country. Anyone who has a working knowledge of The Federalist Papers among other historical records of America's infant government knows that more than a few hammers will shatter on the constitutional anvil.

Frustrating? Yes. I'm eager to see some of the Iraqi Governing Council's pariahs told just where to get off, or at least where their self-interest becomes conceit, a small-mindedness dangerous to all Iraqis. Hopeless? No - never.

As I said yesterday, angry mobs are angry mobs - all passion, no sense. And Iraqis, like Zeyad, know the score:

The reaction of the Shi'ite margi'iyah wasn't a surprise, blaming the coalition. First they ask coalition forces to keep out of the holy sites and stay as far as possible from the festivals, and when something goes wrong they are the first to blame for not providing adequate protection. I'm wondering why someone didn't wisely proclaim 'It was the joooz, you know', or maybe they did and I haven't noticed.

...The shameful silence must end. Where are the cries of outrage from the Arab and Islamic world? Where is the condemnation and denunciation? Where are the fatwas? Where is the seething and shaking fists? Or are these preserved for other people?

The loudest voices of the Near East, of course, are those of dictators and their appointed mouthpieces. The message they send is that only the unfree - the masses of people too ignorant or fearful to disagree - are considered worthy. Iraqis are discovering ways to express themselves that aren't instructed by the state or drawn simply from prejudice. Iraqis rejected rule of the strong and its romanticized nonsense about caliphs and holy warriors when they pulled down the statue of Saddam and vandalized his hundreds of public portraits. In their struggle to live as free, peaceful and enterprising people in the months since, Iraqis have become untouchables to the culture of the oppressed and hateful; authoritarianism, with its secular and theocratic thugs, cannot succeed in free societies. Worthless to the deranged cause of domination and slaughter, the free people of Iraq can never enjoy peace with dictators or the people dictators oppress. They must instead defeat their enemies, terrorists and despot regimes alike; militarily, with the help of Western armies or, more peacefully and perhaps more appropriately, through culture itself.

When I wrote briefly about the second strategy, I had hoped that Iraqi livelihood - its education, its markets, its prosperity - could grow in the face of security threats. Granted, less than one year has passed, and remarkable steps have been taken towards rebuilding Iraq and rejuvenating its society; neither the Japanese nor the Germans faced the kinds of active, paramilitary threats Iraqis do, and yet both Axis countries were very much in disarray one year after V-J and V-E day, respectively. Things may yet move ahead despite the risks of terrorism. And I still believe that liberalization is a far more potent poison to authoritarians than military force alone. But the Iraqis, the Bush administration and the allies need to consider just how causally Iraq's security and the existence of terrorist-supporting regimes next door are related. Iraq may not be able to help the Near East escape from its backwardness unless more of the region is taken from the clutches of terrorists and strongmen.