You'll never guess who said this:

Free trade will be a critical element to [our country's] growth.

Low tax rates [will] help create strong incentives for future investment, employment, and limit the size of the public sector; simplicity in order to minimize the administrative costs of tax collection, transparency to minimize room for tax evasion and corruption, and fairness to ensure that all sectors pay reasonable shares of future taxes.

The speaker is one Kamel al-Gailani, Iraq's new Finance Minister, on announcing that the highest marginal income tax rate (for the Iraqi "super rich") will be 15%; imported clothing, medicine, food and books will not be subject to Iraq's CATO-pipe-dream tariff of 5%; and all sectors barring natural resources will be available for complete foreign ownership. The New York Times has a report that lacks the free-marketeering enthusiasm from Mr. al-Gailani, a quotation that can currently be found only in the Wall Street Journal.

One of the most overlooked powers of a democratic Iraq - understandable now, given today's security uncertainties - is its cultural allure as a market center and a symbol of the Muslim world's escape from tyranny. Growing into an economic powerhouse in the Near East is easy against the region's dismal record; with increasingly mobile and high-tech international trade, Iraq has an excellent chance of becoming a true diamond in the rough - gaining the benefits of the free-market West without suffering from its geographical position. Their own unemployment rates ranging from an estimated 12% to 25%, Iraq's totalitarian, Islamic neighbors will quickly find their people looking to the spontaneous prosperity of Baghdad, back to the worthless society offered by their governments, and then back to Baghdad. If Damascus, Riyadh, Cairo and other capitals aren't clobbered by revolts for individual rights and wealth opportunities, Iraq's borders could become the Rio Grande Valley of the Near East, as swarms of disgruntled Arabs and Persians stream into the country seeking what Mexicans (among many other extranationals) seek here in the United States every day: a better life. While they're at it, the exiting or rioting masses may wave off for good the old attraction of anti-Western, Islamist hysteria - recognizing it as the horrific excuse for perpetual oppression and hopelessness that it is. By losing many thousands of prospective recruits to decent, honest living, terrorism and dictatorship will be dealt a serious blow, much of it accomplished without the firing of a single American bullet.

Busy. Blogging will be a rarity until this evening, when, incidentally, Isabel's remnants finally slip off to the north to leave nothing but sunshine.

In the meantime, read this incredible first sign of Iraq's youth embracing freedom and laying foundations for a peaceful, stable, prosperous future. (Via Andrew Sullivan.)

And take a look at a sky full of Koi-Nobori from this past April's Flying Carp Festival in Japan.

UPDATE: Couldn't pass this one up. IP reminds us exactly why New Europe gets it. The stronger those former Soviet satellites become over the next decades, you realize, the less direct power America will need to project - we'll have fully modern and savvy allies capable of keeping the peace and pressing despots into permanent retirement.

UPDATE II: After five. You know you've been earning your wages when you look up and notice that everybody in the office (and building, it's a Friday) has left. Even after you'd bid half of them a pleasant weekend.

So where is that sun we'd been promised? Cloud cover is gossamer, now; fair enough. Full sunshine by seven is reasonable, yes? I'll have the camera out.

One of the reasons for Hans Blix's popularity with the United Nations and Iraq as UNMOVIC chief seemed to be his penchant for keeping conclusions within the scope of reasoning provided by Saddam's regime. No weapons to be found, despite twelve Security Council resolutions admonishing the Ba'athists for noncompliance? Of course! They must never have been there:

Former UN chief weapons inspector Hans Blix believes that Iraq destroyed most of its weapons of mass destruction 10 years ago.

Blix said it was unlikely that the US and British teams now searching for weapons in Iraq would find more than some "documents of interest."

"I'm certainly coming more and more to the conclusion that Iraq has, as they maintained, destroyed all, almost, of what they had in the summer of 1991," Blix told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

Almost everything? Blix is certainly a timid, collaborative bureaucrat - but I never took him as a shill for the Ba'ath Party. Either the United Nations Special Commission lost a few ring-binders before handing them over to the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspections Commission; Hans Blix doesn't know about documented gaps in weapons turnover; or he's simply omitting obvious facts. First of all, UNSCOM, not the Iraqi regime, destroyed these weapons in their fencing match with the Ba'athists between 1991 to 1998:

38,537 filled and empty CW munitions
480,000 liters (690 tons) of CW agents
3000 tons of precursor chemicals
8 types of delivery systems
The al-Hakam BW production facility
48 Scud missiles
6 operational mobile launchers
28 operational fixed launch pads
32 fixed launch pads under construction
30 chemical warheads
14 conventional warheads
Other related equipment

Is that splitting hairs? Not really. But the inconsistency of Blix's statement with recorded fact is nowhere near that of his other claim to "all, almost, of" Saddam's weapons stockpiles being destroyed in 1991. Under Blix's logic, we can consider the following list of weapon quantities - known to UNSCOM but unaccounted for by the Ba'athist regime as recently as 1998 - to be "almost nothing":

Scud missile components, warheads and propellant
17 tons of growth media for the production of BW agents
Items of CW production equipment
4,000 tons of CW precursors
750 tons of VX precursors
100 al-Hussein missiles
31,000 CW munitions
20 R-17 Scud-B -type missiles
40-70 CBW-capable missile warheads
Significant quantities of biological warfare agents
Significant quantities of 155-mm ammunition rounds

And, once again, Blix misses the point - he misses Saddam's game entirely. Colin Powell warned the Security Council on February 5th of this year about Iraq's nuclear potential and a deceptive strategy that can logically be applied to any weapons pursuit:

We have no indication that Saddam Hussein has ever abandoned his nuclear weapons programme. On the contrary, we have more than a decade of proof that he remains determined to acquire nuclear weapons.

Former senior Iraqi nuclear scientist Khidir Hamza indicated a similar Hussein game plan (emphasis mine):

What is not recognized by the world community, though, is the determination with which the regime of Saddam Hussein intends to pursue programs to produce weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear weapons, once sanctions are lifted. The nuclear weapons group is still in place; the expertise is still there; and Saddam Hussein and his colleagues are well practiced in the arts of deception.

Blix's also repeats the silly idea that Saddam would bluff possession of WMDs. It's obvious that his press statements were meant for European consumption - but they're insulting to relevant facts nonetheless. Set aside the reasonable assumption that Iraq has not received anything resembling a thorough search (many of the unaccounted items are incredibly easy to hide, anywhere in the country) and the suspicion that weapons may have been sent to trusted caretakers. Against the very information of his own general department, Blix adds more credibility to the idea that he was not a man meant to lead an invasive, successful disarmament verification operation.

Andrew Sullivan has been giving some badly needed attention to the ideological postures assumed by the left and right on the war on terror. I've addressed the topic a couple of times before: the ideational divide separating left from the right is an ethical and moral preference, respectively, for a relativist and absolutist value scale. That internal compass then dictates the positions taken by each side on a political issue. ["Liberals" have stumped for progressive causes over the last century with "conservatives" defending established mores, institutions and concepts.] It's a blog-and-a-half for another day, but I would argue that [some liberals] pushed so far on concrete matters in the late 1960s and early 1970s that they crossed the line of radicalism; they have emerged as reactionary on many issues. Not all, but certainly the most pressing. And the right has taken up progressivity. Says Sullivan:

My old friend Ian Buruma had a bracing essay in the Financial Times over the weekend. He baldly states something that is, to my mind, indisputable: the biggest force for conservatism in world affairs right now is the Western left. You only have to listen to what pass for their arguments about the remarakable experiment now being attempted in Iraq to witness the sheer Tory pessimism of them all. Their "anti-Orientalist" stance has robbed them of any means to criticize Arab or Islamist societies, or to support reform of them, even if it means temporary armed intervention. Their support for "peace" is really an argument for complete Western disengagement from societies and cultures where tyranny, genocide, terror and theocracy abide. How is it that one can scour the pages of, say, the Nation and not find a single essay marveling at the new freedoms in Iraq - of the press, of free speech, of religious diversity? Even when they do see the good side of, say, greater freedom for women in Afghanistan, their loathing of the Bush administration dampens much of their liberal conviction.

Sullivan has more. Again, I disagree with the "right is left" idea on a technical level - Sullivan makes the point, of course, and that's all he means to do with the title. But my angle is that "left" and "right" remain fixed in the ideational sense, relativist versus absolutist, while the resulting concrete political assumptions change from liberal to conservative case by case.

Nonetheless, it's wonderful to see this ethical watershed trickling its way into mainstream debate. Give it a few years to become commonplace and the phenomenon may change the way in which everyday people view parties and issues.

ALSO: More thoughts on the ideological switcheroo. The basic idea has always appealed to me as a sense of the general trend in politics rather than a grand unifying theory with footnotes and a patent. So it's always a matter of refinement:

What confuses most of us about leftists as reactionaries are long-standing associations of ideology with politics that have been taken for granted. "Left" is considered synonymous with "liberal," "right" with "conservative." That's not so. The trick is to separate the ideational from the concrete.

In the ideational, two poles exist: relativism and absolutism. Any variable can be assigned to these ethical and moral perceptions - we choose, respectively, "left" and "right." These never change: the relativist remains equivocal and qualifying of values, the absolutist adamant of universally commensurate values. Thus, the left and right - in the realm of the idea - do not trade places, but are ever irreconcilable and opposing.

Concrete political application - radical, liberal, moderate, conservative, reactionary - is where adherents to the left or right trade places with each other. On one issue, the absolutist might defend tradition (conservative) and the relativist will reject it (liberal). On another, the absolutist might seek social progress on grounds of moral equity (liberal) and the relativist will deny it (conservative). Right and left (absolutism, relativism) have not changed; but identities as "conservative" and "liberal" have.

We can look to a just handful of modern liberal causes and assign them to the right as absolutists (not necessarily to a party, Democrat or Republican, but to an ideological orientation): emancipation of slaves, universal suffrage, civil rights. Look at modern conservative causes run by the left as relativists: so-called progressive taxation, identity through race and gender, defending the 20th Century welfare state. It goes on and on, and some issues are actually split up into subtopics on which the left and right go both liberal and conservative. Beyond the surface - party affiliation, indentity as "lib" or "con" - many of us, especially at this apparent turning point, may be at a different pole than we would first assume.

But the point is that yes, the right is progressive on foreign policy - many who are referred to as "conservatives" are, and have been, liberal.

Over lunch, I read the Wall Street Journal article by Karl Zinsmeister that Randy Barnett is highlighting on Volokh. As usual, it looks as though anti-Americanism is far from the hot summer fashion the press would have us believe. In addition to those Barnett lists, another myth was debunked:

Evidence of the comparative gentleness of this war can be seen in our poll. Less than 30% of our sample of Iraqis knew or heard of anyone killed in the spring fighting. Meanwhile, fully half knew some family member, neighbor or friend who had been killed by Iraqi security forces during the years Saddam held power.

No, life wasn't enjoyable under Saddam Hussein, nor worth the protection it received before late March.

The article does remind us that the terror of war, however just, impresses a fear of soldiery - liberation or not - in the minds of a population. Taken in conjunction with George H.W. Bush's acceptance of a limited military role in Saddam Hussein's expulsion from Kuwait - thereby abandoning the 1991 Shiite uprising - it should be no surprise that within the first six months, Iraqis are "wary" of us.

But just as Zinmeister suggests that "Khomeini II," "Osama II," and "Ba'ath Revival" be "scratched from the list of morbid fears," we should also banish "Quagmire," "Vietnam," "Failure," and "Winning Presidential Campaign Strategy Based on Feeding Doubt" from the realm of possibility.

Reuel Marc Gerecht, on the decisions being weighed for post-Saddam Iraq, expresses what he sees as a policy retreat:

The Bush administration's embrace of odd, counterproductive notions is nowhere more evident than in its energetic pursuit of foreign Muslim troops for Iraq. The reasoning for these deployments - which probably won't happen unless the United States gets the consent of the French, Germans, and Russians at the U.N. - apparently is that Iraqi Muslims would respect foreign Muslim troops more than they respect American soldiers. Leaving aside why in the world the Bush administration would want to deploy Muslim soldiers from nondemocratic countries to Iraq, the Muslim-likes-Muslim sentiment behind this argument is a myth. Middle Eastern history teaches the opposite. Since the dawn of the 19th century Muslim states have shown much greater confidence in the professionalism of Western soldiers than of fellow Muslims. Rulers and intellectuals may say nasty things about Westerners publicly, but privately they have consistently shown that they feel safer with infidels than they do with their own. After the first Gulf War, the Persian Gulf states made a big show of wanting the Egyptians and the Syrians, not the Americans, to assume the responsibility for their security. No Egyptian or Syrian soldier ever landed. The sheikhs and the intellectuals may hate us in their hearts; but they absolutely don't want to entrust their property, wives, and daughters to foreign Arab Muslims.

Emphasis is mine for the question I've been asking since the apparent White House reversal hit the news and people started chattering about "Muslim faces on the ground." Irrespective of the gap in equipment and professionalism between top-notch Anglo-Americans and Near Easterners, every nation bordering Iraq is not only opposed to the country's present course towards self-government but eager to carve it up into blocks of arable land and oil fields, too. And with Iraqi civilians topping the casualty lists for recent bombing attacks, no one can claim that insurgents discriminate West from East in their killings.

Gerecht's article tackles several more matters on Iraq's early reconstruction - a great read.

ALSO: Max Singer underscores the growing belief among even the most progressive that the situation in Iraq - because it is obviously a combination of reconstruction and combat - has come to a crossroads. Several strategic offensive options are available to the adminstration, and it's still a question as to how many the White House will embrace as policy. Serious as Singer's delivery is, he knows the score:

The danger in Iraq does not imply that it was a mistake for the U.S. to remove Saddam. There was no possibility of the U.S. inducing Arab governments to act strongly against terrorist organizations had Saddam been left in power.

The U.S. response to the danger of militant Islam must have three parts. First, defensive measures against terrorism in the U.S. Second, eliminating safe havens for terrorist organizations abroad — which means primarily inducing Muslim governments to stop harboring terrorist organizations and demonstrating U.S. willingness to use power. Third, a long-term effort to help moderate Muslims reduce the influence of militant Islam among Muslims generally.

In other words, rejection of Islamofascists through the power of liberty can be achieved, so Allied forces can't lose their momentum.

Via Instapundit, Howard Owens squares on the Iraqi restoration. Challenges, hardships - but mostly good news.

The king quote is one that perfectly describes my own attitude - especially after having read about Japan's occupation:

Nobody ever promised -- not the President, not Don Rumsfeld, not any neo-con you care to name -- that the rebuilding of Iraq would be easy and without costs. Personally, I said it would be easier than the leftists said it would be, but I never said it would be easy. And so far, nothing has happened to change my mind. It is going pretty much as I expected.

Two points I always return to. First, to the naysayers or daily pants-soilers: what did you imagine the "difficulties" and "challenges," as described by the Bush administration, would be? Lots of parking tickets? A rise in shoplifting? Second, it truly has turned out as I expected. I've said this many times but I can't say it enough: read about the Japanese and German occupations. Nothing went completely as planned and both nations suffered with unrest, crime, confusion, and despair while they struggled forward towards the hope of redemption.

Japan took seven years. Consider the pessimism and baseless criticism that has been rattling in the five months since Baghdad fell, and imagine that it might happen sixteen times again. Those of us with great expectations of the Iraqis have the fortitude to withstand the next years, I think - especially those Americans and allies in charge and on the ground in Iraq. The others, who bite their cheeks with tiny thoughts of doubt, are likely to run out of energy much sooner.

Into the Big House he goes:

Earlier Friday, the 82nd Airborne Division raided the home of a prominent former Baath Party member who has terrorized the region as a crime organization boss since the fall of deposed dictator Saddam Hussein.

Former Ba'athists making lateral transfers to organized crime - who would have guessed?

Picture, if you will, an occupying force arming locals not as conscripts but as part of training them to one day protect their country themselves:

After being trained by the 4th Infantry Division, 31 Iraqi Civil Defense Corps militiamen walked side by side, their AK-47 rifles ready, with U.S. soldiers, greeting townsfolk and the occasional shopkeeper.

Most shops were closed Friday, the Muslim holy day and the day Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld flew to Tikrit to meet American troops and be briefed by commanders. For the visit, the Iraqi militiamen redirected traffic from the main highway as a security precaution.

But more importantly, the Iraqi militia - known as the Tikrit Patrol - made its presence known to residents.

"People are happy to see us," said Joseph Musaad, 24, one of the militiamen. "We speak Arabic to them. We greet them with salaam aleikum (peace be upon you)."

Editor's note: empires do not do this.

You know I don't care for the United Nations one tiny bit. Though I know better than to take a move by the Bush administration at face value - the White House's track record on strategic, political victory is impressive; remember how Bush's conviction of Saddam was going to die in the Security Council? - Armed Liberal voices my major worries wonderfully. (Via IP.)

Reconstruction is something on which I feel justified to give Bush enormous leeway. This, however, is a development deserving of a little sternness. Let's see how it goes.