The continuing senseless attacks on Iraqis and Iraqi interests as well as Allied targets have been ascribed qualities that one would a popular uprising. Unfortunately, the indiscretion of targets - from Allies' humvees to the Iraqis' oil pipelines, no preference - seems to indicate that the objective of Iraq's antagonists is simply to batter the country's population into reclaiming the same submissive fear they called their own while under the thumbscrews of Saddam Hussein.

An audio tape with a voice claiming to be the dead or missing dictator has appealed to the nation, demanding their support in a subversion of the occupation. From the start, such posturing will have limited results. As long as George W. Bush is in office, Americans will not leave the country. Accepting that, will weekly scenes like this endear the nation to the purveyors of random violence?

Seven Iraqi police recruits died today as explosives packed into a utility pole near a police station went off during the graduation ceremony for the first American-trained class for a new police force.

More than 70 people were injured as shrapnel from the metal pole and the bomb ripped through a large crowd around noon, said a hospital director where most of the injuries were treated in bloodstained corridors and emergency rooms.

On the street outside the police station, pools of blood blotted the pavement where the dead and injured had fallen during the ceremony that was to mark the successful transition from the old era of police torture and corruption to a new era of more civil society with the benefit of American training.

Fox News carried a report that quoted an Iraqi who was convinced that Americans, having apparently missed their chance to slaughter Iraqis wholesale with mass incendiary, decided to try some psychological malice and shred a police force they'd spent weeks training:

Still, many of the victims blamed America for the attack.

"The Americans have done it. Who else would do a thing like this?" said police instructor Abdel-Karim Hamadi.

To Mr. Hamadi - with all due respect - many other, more logical sources for the murder come to mind.

And, in fact, the continuing attempts to grind down the will of Americans - to liberate - and Iraqis - to right and govern themselves civilly - may tell us more about the people of Iraq than the mood or persistence of Allied democratization. Will they realize that it is their very future that is being threatened in its infancy by many of their own people? Will they take the leap of faith and accept that their occupiers could easily have annihilated the whole of their arid, backwards, ghoulish, Ba'athist, terrorist stockade - but never dreamt of it, instead taking great pains to allow the Iraqis the reins to a fruitful destiny wreathed in moral responsibility? Would the Iraqis truly cheer on the destruction of their budding country, turn about and traipse straight back into hell?

Many in the intellectual classes are sitting on sidelines with wide-angle lenses, pushing and shoving for the split-second capture of the moment when the Allies crack. They've got it all wrong: the Allies, mindful of a possible future viewed through the spoilt mirror of September 11th, will never give up. History tells it more completely, with every vanquished, would-be conquerer given a hand back up onto its feet.

It's the Iraqis who are on trial - but amidst the worry from the middle and the cackling from the left, we would be wise to put good money on and wholehearted faith in the people of Iraq.

The greatest one-sentence appeal for peace through strength since "Go ahead, make my day."

The difficult days we knew the Allies would encounter are frustrating, though not necessarily for the reasons suggested by cynical opinion columnists:

A huge blast in the courtyard of a mosque in Fallujah killed five Iraqis late Monday night, prompting locals to declare that the U.S. had bombed the building. American troops at the scene said instead that a hidden ammunition dump appeared to have blown up.

[...]

By Tuesday morning about a dozen Iraqis remained, looking through the rubble for pieces of metal they said would prove the Americans had attacked the mosque. "These are pieces of a missile," said Aqeel Ibrahim Ali, 26, holding out a box filled with metal shards. "An airplane shot a missile."

Aqeel and his bosses, the group who stepped up to accuse American forces for the blast whose ignition they obviously oversaw, are in the business of terror and mayhem; whether they're Ba'athists, employees of Tehran's homicidal meddlings or simply common louts on the streets with chaos to propound, they seek to disrupt the lives of people traumatized for decades.

A thought: was Aqeel part of the scheme to begin with or was he cajoled into playing a part? Or threatened?

The Allies will move to succeed in their tasks. Unfortunately, the well-being and complete reconstruction of Iraq depends on its population to rise to the challenge of defending their country from outside influence and offer their irreplaceable contribution to law and order. Fear under Saddam was the stuff of miserable life, yes, but it can no longer dictate the actions of the Iraqi people. Gangs must be reported, troublemakers cornered, flimsy tales and misbegotten protests challenged. A society's ability to shame mischief and reward selflessness is best not forgotten. For all the foreign money and manpower in a country undergoing democratization, only its native citizenry can preserve moral and ethical integrity.

This will take time; even Japan, which, militarist swoon notwithstanding, possessed a traditionally strong cultural ethos, fell into what it rightly considered to be utter moral debasement and incivility. 1948, three years into Allied occupation, was in fact the height of lawlessness, murder, corruption, licentiousness and faithlessness. Despair nearly became an integral part of contemporary Japanese culture. From Jiro Osagari's Homecoming, excerpted in William Chapman's Inventing Japan:

[Protagonist] Kyogo couldn't forget the [protest] broadcast. It showed him how much of the grace had gone out of Japanese life. Nowadays, poverty had only an evil effect, even on Japanese. It had made everyone terribly impatient. Post-war Japan was really a desert. The young were devoid of subtlety - as one might expect of a generation stripped of its past.

Chapman explains how, predictably, the book's twinkles of hope come only from the past - the past seen everywhere in the present to be lost and unattainable for the future. Appealed to by a friend with an analgesic, Chinese adage, "The sun sets and the myriad aimless movements cease," Kyogo answers bitterly:

But Ushigi - it's still aimless movement. The state is dead but the aimless movement hasn't ceased. Is there anyone in Japan who lives in accordance with his own definite opinions? That's what I wonder about. It's a narrow land. And the people - they're so poor, so terribly poor. There's no room to dream, no leeway. The Japanese can only work up enough courage to grab somebody's leg and beg for food. A pathetic people.

In their stories, Osagari and his contemporaries birthed maudlin chroniclers that lived and, happily, died as Japan gradually withdrew from the nightmare of moral and industrial collapse. We should take from this historical parallel two points. First, the troubles of post-war Japan must not be taken lightly: suffering and confusion of the Iraq people will be at once unique in its aesthetics - the evil of regionally cultural anarchists and terrorists - and universal in its effect - potentially paralytic vitiation. The country will most likely remain dangerously uncertain of its course and worth for some time. But, second, and more encouraging, is the record of Japan's transcendence. While all nations walk in their own Valley of the Shadow of Death, every one is capable of defeating their worst imperfections.

The Allies will be a source of endless logistics and guidance, if only those resources can be utilized by Iraqis. To this, all that is needed is patience and perseverance and faith.

Tacitus, refusing to confidently believe that Iraq is Japan and Normandy rolled into one - the end of a dictatorship and the beginning of a final campaign against a culture of death, difficult and lengthy challenges both - appears to have officially bugged out.

Hopefully temporarily. We've all had our shares of panicky moments - but at some point, if we can truly claim to support the idea of fighting terror by fighting authoritarianism, we need to sit back and let those to whom we've entrusted power manage the war. My moment came. I passed the test, I'm fairly sure.

On a related note, it's sad to see that Tacitus' site is often a bus stop for nutcakes. Open a thread and read the mindboggling comparisons of hand-tied-behind-the-back American liberation with sickening malevolence of lawless terrorists. To be honest, it's unsettling to visit most days, anymore.

UPDATE: Perhaps "panic" is too strong a word. I'm willing to assign it to my gut feelings when making the entry linked above; I wasn't ready to jump out a window, but I certainly was quite capable of writing a furrow-browed entry along the lines of "Boy, oh boy, the Bush administration isn't listening to what I'm saying and they're in for it now if they don't shape up." As I said, I learned my lesson - reading about Japan, even in the sense of establishing a more realistic sense of time, helped incredibly. I've made the comparison to the proverbial Normandy before, insofar as it's dangerous to think that even though democratization must be believed to be inevitable, the region can be deloused at a leisurely pace.

UPDATE II: I followed Tacitus' link to Josh Marshall's latest observation from the left. No, no, no: as yet, a great many people are still in the mindset that the problem was not Saddam, but the weapons. No weapons, fine; we'll leave Saddam alone and, one supposes, "hunt al Qaeda." All the while, al Qaeda mysteriously sustains itself - mysteriously because as a corollary, the dictatorships in the region have nothing to do with the terrorists. In fact, that's indicative of a complete misunderstanding of what this conflict is about. It's about culture and freedom. The absence of freedom is a foothold for evil. I can't say that enough. The only way to defeat terror is to remove the machinery that is caretaker for a nightmarishly frustrated society. That means destroying Near East dictators if the worst they've got are pop-guns. "It's the government, stupid!" Making weapons the major argument is Bush and Blair's own trap out of which to wriggle; but that by no means diminishes the power of the true argument.

UPDATE III: The Allies are moving. No coincidence, I'm sure. They know what they're doing. We should all know that undertakings in that region are far more difficult than they look - especially because those of us far away do, at best, see through a glass darkly.

Nothing got in or out of Iraq without Saddam Hussein's knowledge, so we know where these reports from MSNBC and CNN are leading towards. Saddam Hussein was a psychopath - not an idiot. The international community, quite accustomed to his brazen denials and outright shell games in the midst of Special Commission teams, thought he was too proud to break down his prized possessions into unrecognizable fragments. Baghdad's Capone would never hide behind a speakeasy.

Unlikely, but not impossible. Anyone who can withstand the slow, grinding death of a modern country's economy from sanctions, all for the continued possession of the world's most powerful weapons, can certainly resolve to outlast international scrutiny. Saddam's unraveling work shows an absolutely confident, disciplined criminal mind: disarm oneself, and let yourself be frisked, albeit declining a body cavity search. Stare your inquistors down.

Too far-fetched? How soon we forget: remember, if the United States had listened to the grand wisdom of the United Nations Security Council, the assault on Saddam would never have happened. It never would have happened. Clinton passed on his opportunity. Bush Sr. did, too, in a different way. But they both balked. This time might have tragically been a similar failure of will.

Now, the left will take this news unabashed, because - as the mantra goes - "Bush told us the threat was imminent." But "imminent" almost always meant terms of dissemination to terrorists, not the "missile-tipped silos" tripwire espoused by some - that incidentally brings to mind airbags that deploy ten seconds after violent impact, just to ensure that their exertion is justified.

Part of this heat is understandable, even while it remains unjustified and a simple act of trusting Saddam over Bush. I've remarked a few times that Bush and Blair trapped themselves by assuming a humanitarian/sociopolitical appeal, stating that the destruction of the Near East's dictatorships would in fact starve terrorism, could never persuade. Instead, they limited themselves to the highly semantic and troublesome route of "weapons of mass destruction." When in fact the point was not so much weapons but their controller, his intended uses for such and the regional culture his presence maintained, the argument nevertheless focused simply on the weapons. Bush and Blair were forced to claim that a weaponless Ba'athist Iraq was an acceptable Ba'athist Iraq - a farce for many dozens of reasons.

The discovery of weapons and programs will accomplish two things: a political vindication of Messrs. Blair and Bush, and the prevention of technological proliferation to authoritarians of all stripes. But the real victory is injecting - forcefully, unapologetically - democracy into what is today a hideous mockery of society.

Everyone with an ear open to Iraq news know about the American air strike against a convoy believed to have been transporting Saddam Hussein and heirs. The general wire report, as carried in major outlets such as the Washington Post, adds an editorial,, subtly but tellingly (emphasis mine):

Defense officials said yesterday that they were investigating whether a strike on a three-vehicle convoy fleeing Iraq near the Syrian border last Wednesday killed top officials in the government of former president Saddam Hussein, perhaps including Hussein or his sons.

The officials said that DNA tests were being carried out on the victims, and the AC-130 gunship strike by Special Operations forces had drawn high-level attention in the Pentagon.

Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary obliges us with prevailing definitions:

1. A living being sacrificed to some deity, or in the performance of a religious rite; a creature immolated, or made an offering of.

2. A person or thing destroyed or sacrificed in the pursuit of an object, or in gratification of a passion; as, a victim to jealousy, lust, or ambition.

3. A person or living creature destroyed by, or suffering grievous injury from, another, from fortune or from accident; as, the victim of a defaulter; the victim of a railroad accident.

4. Hence, one who is duped, or cheated; a dupe; a gull.

The trouble is, Ba'athists - least of all Saddam Hussein - qualify as any of these illustrations of victimhood.

No surprise: Fox News used an Associated Press report but strictly referred to the objects of forensic interest as "remains" "Iraqis killed."

Still unconvinced that America is without the best intentions for Iraq? Consider this: Empires do not, as a general principle, arm their conquests for military autonomy.

Drudge was injecting a bit of hype to this photograph, as I'm not particularly sure the Shiites involved were necessarily calling for Islamist involvement (read: Iranian-mullah chicanery). If the Shi'ites are, in fact, responsibly petitioning their place in liberal democratic governance, success in Iraq to date is far ahead of what MacArthur had accomplished by late fall of 1945 in Japan.

Fox News reports a possible watershed:

Documents bearing the seal of Saddam Hussein's secret service were seized early Saturday by U.S. forces during a raid of a Baghdad (search) community hall.

The documents, which were handed over to senior intelligence analysts, mentioned Iraq's nuclear program and may possibly contain information regarding Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.

[...]

Some of the documents seized Saturday included manifests for the delivery of communications equipment to the Iraqi nuclear agency. One letter, dated Feb. 7, 1998, from the National Security Council of Iraq was addressed to the Iraqi Nuclear Organization, with a carbon to the Mukhabarat, the secret intelligence service.

If true, this is reason enough to take to task those who have spent the last month and a half on Saddam Hussein's side in the matter. The credibility guillotine will come right down on the despotaphiles' heads. Amazingly, it already has several times before: the refugees, the casualties, the Arab pandemonium, the terrorist conflagration; all threatened, none of which ever transpired. The despotaphiles didn't learn. They probably never will - but that's no reason for us not to chastise them before we ignore them on further matters.

More importantly, success in weapons accounting will complete the initial objectives. Saddam will have been vanquished; his tentacles of violent consumation and horrid esurience will have been cut and those of the terrorists snipped back a bit. We're winning.

There's a fair amount of subtle smugness in the media yet; this article from England's Times is the latest in a series of reports that, disconnected from historical perspective, work to sow doubt in our ranks and to serve, if inadvertantly, as tools of incitement for enemies of Iraq's democratization. Some bloggers have sensibly commented and others have, indirectly, corroborated this article to a point.

To a point. Let's have some of that historical perspective: the murder rate in Japan in 1947 was over four times what it was in 1940. This was two years of occupation; not two months, nor in a country literally surrounded by an enemy morally indistinguishable from those just defeated. In 1952, according the Jean Stoetzel's Without the Chrysanthemum and the Sword, three in four of those polled in Japan thought that the nation's lack moral conduct, their loss of "giri" through deplorable behavior, crime and lawlessness, was near-irrevocable.

Trouble is never good news, but it's silly to furrow the brow over this stuff in Iraq so early in the post-war reconstruction. It's seriously disingenious to flutter about as if this brand of instability had never occurred (and been overcome) before. (And I find it interesting to note that the Japanese laid most of the blame for their societal troubles at their own feet - not the Americans').

Two months. From all accounts, the unrest is generally from Ba'athists (the forces we have been destroying) and, as found in the so-called Sunni Triangle, terrorists from the rest of the sickened Near East (the forces we will need to destroy).

I'm no opponent of keeping a critical eye on Iraq - yet do we need the impatience, shortsightedness and lack of easily obtained knowledge? The expectation for massive military, societal and economic conditions to right themselves as neatly as a miniseries is dumb; and deadly. Try arduously commentating on a marathon runner's pace, stride after stride after stride after stride after stride after stride after stride: you'll end up with thousands of shrill, histrionic, directionless and contradictory reports on an affair that takes a significant amount of time to appreciably develop. That's the mentality of modern journalism.

Except, of course, when journalists are mature and possess a drop of knowledge on the subject. Enter Victor Davis Hanson.