In three years of war coverage the culture of elite leftist journalism, its uniformly inspired daily product, has proven itself to be an occupation of deception, not detail; work that is compulsive, not committed; with a character that is pungent and mordant, and neither pointed nor clever. The second exposed link between a news agency and the plain enemy of mankind — that of CBS News and a terrorist gang's cameraman — is only an invitation to consider how that sort of relationship now defines the industry, especially since the first instance of collusion won one of this year's most prestigious awards for what was once reporting. If we do, we realize that bureaus are doing this not because they seek all information but instead, since events can in fact be prevented by scheduled witnesses, there's a certain narrative they'd prefer to tell.

Loathsome, it hardly stands out in a rich history of men made Faust, subscribing on the devil's ledger for worldly things — in this case, spite, revenge and sophistry — in the trust that they're smarter than the last fool who met a fiery default; or the one before him, or before that one, or that one, and so on. That we can't understand why the leftist press is enthusiastically aiding those who would immediately destroy it — betrayers are punished first — is why even the modern age can't alchemize guile into wisdom.

Compulsive, not committed. All the newspapers rushing to declare this weekend's modest Baghdad protests in the name of Muqtada al-Sadr and all accompanying horrors as a savage twist of fate missed the real irony: on the second anniversary of Saddam Hussein's symbolic fall, al-Sadr's assembly was peacefully demonstrating, subordinate to the rule of law. Beaten by American might and Iraqi common good, Iran's patsy had to pretend he was part of the nation whose birth he couldn't thwart.

Adolf Hitler played much the same part, of course, upon exiting prison in 1924, a little over a year after his disastrous "Beer Hall" putsch. But the dimwitted al-Sadr is not the sly Austrian weasel; and the Weimar Republic was weak from the start, the rent for Hitler to nestle into pulled apart with the full-hearted effort of several Germans in those fifteen years of stifling neglect. In liberated Iraq a firm grounding has been set in the face of a sustained brutality the Nazis' 1932 party street-killings couldn't match. A trial met and won teaches value, and Iraq stands taller and stronger after two difficult years than the republic quietly conceived from Philipp Scheidemann's single impulsive remark.

Apart from the conspiracy loons and cranks, who should never be left an audience, a host of field students, scholars and experts have seen their bromides, predictions and pronouncements overturned as one force — that of this troubled world's capacity for goodness — endured. Afghanistan was neither impregnable nor doomed, Iraq's people were not too faint for their hand-to-hand struggle. Yet with more pride than shame, academia can't rest in faith; it must doubt in all things but its own intellectual investments. In today's Wall Street Journal, Iraqi Jalal Talabani exhorted a new Iraq to the West and to the world. He may have also meant to quietly answer a rather sour challenge, written in the same editorial page space three days earlier by a man on hand during the Coalition Provisional Authority's administration, New York University professor Noah Feldman.

He's informally billed as the Jewish Arabist-Islamist. Such a title probably aspires to a cosmopolitan air but critics on the right simply take that to mean Feldman's confused. His record in Iraq is not so much checkered as is his transcript; towards the end of 2003 he could have debated himself within the space of a month, phoning in a falling Iraqi sky to the authorities around Halloween and talking "solvable" just after Thanksgiving. The record shows that at no time have cataclysms existed in Iraq, though often in the imaginations of cynics and skeptics; which means Mr. Feldman is either opportunistic or sorely unobservant for his professional esteem.

Being wrong about something repeatedly still can't lower esteem to where a major newspaper won't have your opinion piece, so on Friday, April 8th Feldman introduced his article "A Backroom Constitution" (posted online a day later) with four paragraphs built exclusively on innuendo. The first sentence alone relegates Ibrahim Jaafari's nomination as prime minister to "backroom deals" — what, were Tony Blair's and John Howard's by impartial Olympic panel? With a broad brush not nearly big enough for its heavy daubs of tar: Feldman hits the Kurds ("'politcking'...infighting") and the Shiites ("experienced in...internecine politics of Iran") and the Kurds with the Shiites ("got to know each other during prewar meetings in London [over tea, crumpets and hegemony jam? — please tell us, Mr. Feldman]") and foreign-based umbrella groups ("the group of exile politicians who returned to Iraq after Saddam's fall") twice, in fact ("seeking that sovereignty be transferred directly to them") and Ayatollah Ali Sistani ("Islamically oriented Shiite politicians") and the Kurds for three ("results made the Kurds kingmakers") and then Iyad Allawi and Ahmad Chalabi ("both of whom had close ties to...US intelligence") before returning to Shiites ("ties to Iran").

It's not clear whether Feldman intended his article for readers with not even a tiny understanding of parliamentary procedure or whether his contempt for eight million Iraqi voters exceeds what he carries for everybody in Baghdad politics but the Sunnis, for only once does he refer to the National Assembly as a "freely elected government," and then in a clause beginning with the word "although."

Iraqis have best served themselves by decisively identifying their enemies, both political and mortal. Terrorists fit tightly into the latter category. The United Nations would be considered political, for all its pandering and filching and cozying with Saddam; Al-Jazeera and other despot-run Arab cable networks are both political and mortal for their furtive work with terrorists and upstarts. Feldman seems determined to become a political enemy as well; half-over, his Journal article finishes with some insulting and faulty advice. Deals cut in parliament? Constitutional compromises? Hard-edged backbencher cliques? Feldman's failure isn't recognizing the democratic sausage-grinder, since he lists all of these things; it's that he takes civil disagreement to be something of a problem.

That's the center of it. Like the academics, like the gentry leftist media: this man writes as if self-determination offends his sensibility. The American alliance is still obligated to ensure that Iraq emerges from the nursery a free country — no "whatever they choose we take" nonsense, not even the Germans gave Hitler's National Socialists a Reichstag majority on March 5, 1933 when elections weren't a complete farce — but the authority and propriety of foreign micromanagement ended last June, when L. Paul Bremer gave power to an Iraqi transitional government. Funnily enough, when I wrote two months ago of unexpected Iraqi actions that would be spun by spoilsports as failure, I truly meant "public slights" and "operational impediments." Feldman gives us nothing but business as usual, to where we could paste over the print names and descriptions with those of any other parliamentary democracy and not know the difference. His introduction adds up to a rigged government and yet a different chorus of detractors told us it was chaos.

Finally, he approaches disingenuous imploring the Assembly's leaders to "incorporate" the Sunnis in lawmaking, when he means "offer concessions." True, Sunnis — if we're strictly scoring on sectarian lines — only gained half their demographic representation. But then Sunni areas were Saddam's criminal nests, most habitable to Ba'athists, gangsters and foreign terrorists; and leaders who shunned the election had their bluff called. Feldman talks of a "political solution" to be presented when in fact a combination political and military solution has ennervated Iraq's enemies for two months, now. There are plans to pull the law-abiding majority of Sunnis out from under rank intimidation. But that solution doesn't come from a foreigner. President Jalal Talabani:

[W]hile the new Iraq is open to all, there must be no underestimating our determination to vanquish terrorism. Conciliation is not capitulation, nor is compromise to be deemed equivalent to imbalanced concession. Rather, it is through conciliation and compromise that we are buildign a fair Iraq, a just state for all its peoples. Democracies, unlike dictatorships, are forgiving and generous, but they cannot survive unless they fight. And fight we shall.

To his credit Feldman believed Iraq's elections could not be postponed but his essential lobbying for political capital an Iraqi bloc simply hasn't earned is counter to democratic metrics, and a nudge right back to the minority tyrant — which Talabani, a man completely new to elected representation, understands precisely. When Talabani talks of "human rights, primarily of the individual, but also of our diverse ethnic and religious heritage," and places it against Saddam Hussein's murderous exploitation, he's speaking of an Iraq that foreign pedants, drawing cultural conclusions from a closed society, haven't yet recognized. Iraqis, like Afghans, aren't exactly waiting for permission to become pluralist.

The division between universalists and relativists has been untraversable since September 11th. Today, we can watch another, subtler separation taking place, that of the self-interested intellectuals and the selfless. The relativists act out of recklessness and malevolence; with the intellectuals, it's for their treatise that would have overturned the "simple" adage stating that given the opportunity, free men might work for good. We'll find that some among us don't like liberal Iraqi self-determination after all.

One of Noah Feldman's black marks centered on a handful of Muqtada al-Sadr's henchmen slipping into the National Assembly. A day before the gentry press made a go of presenting al-Sadr's protests as more than they were, we were told that the "backroom" constitutionalists ought to pay attention to Sadrite demands.

Do we fear it? And everything else we've been told lies only one unheeded warning away from Judgment? Best to trust the people who will eventually put "Mookie" away like the mobster he is. From Baghdad, Ali Fadhil, watching Iraq's try at C-SPAN, recalled with a good deal of humor a roiling speech from an al-Sadr goon about all things reprehensible. The MP growled and spat and quoted from the Koran through half of his time; and when he was done, said Ali, "his speech was met by a shy clapping from one member, and that's all."

A February meeting in Washington between the American Secretaries of State and Defense, and the Japanese Foreign Minister and Defense Agency Director produced a string of joint statements including bilateral military and political policy once inconceivable. Most statements were confirmations of shared principle; regional and global safety, security, diplomacy. A few, like the delicate handling of atomic North Korea and the unprecedented Tokyo pledge to "encourage the peaceful resolution" of Taiwan's Beijing-vexed sovereignty, described matters in which action might be taken by the pair over months and years to prevent disaster but whose ends relied on antagonists ceasing to be; since the Taiwanese would never surrender their hard-won freedom to the fascist Chinese and Pyongyang's Kim regime would turn macerative without the stuff of agitation.

One mutuality was very concrete in its purpose and realization, that of "realignment of U.S. force structure in Japan." Parties would see staff "report expeditiously" on how to accomplish this, and six weeks later they have done just that:

Japan and the United States are negotiating a military realignment that could move some or all of the nearly 20,000 Marines off the crowded island of Okinawa, close underused bases and meld an Army command in Washington state with a camp just south of Tokyo.

..."The United States wants Japan to assume a role very much like the one it has vis-a-vis the British," said Tetsuo Maeda, professor of arms reduction and security at Tokyo International University. "The Self-Defense Forces would be regularly deployed overseas for military operations if this kind of realignment were realized."

The title of the Associated Press article, "US Wants Japan to Boost Military Role," might be thought misleading if not for this speculation near the end of the piece:

Koizumi is under pressure to lighten the burden borne by Okinawa, which hosts the bulk of the U.S. troops, and any troop reduction would be a political coup for him and offer a chance for Tokyo to use its own military to fill the void.

As before, a Japan assuming its own watch would gradually lend America back its forces and establish by example Tokyo's military privileges. From the next sentence onward the article becomes unhelpful, conflating militarist conquest — helpfully euphemized as "expansionism" — with a democracy's geopolitical participation, the most recent and noteworthy of Japan's in Iraq and Afghanistan and Indonesia totally divorced from tyranny's subjugation. The article closes on a point of conflict between bureau and lay, drawing from the notion that Japan's population is fiercely devoted to neutrality and deference in world affairs. That understanding is based in fact — but if the rightist newspaper Yomiuri Shimbun has done its polling right, fact from a Japan that no longer exists:

Sixty-one percent of respondents to the latest opinion poll by The Yomiuri Shimbun said the current Constitution should be revised. This is the second-highest figure since this newspaper started surveying public opinion on the nation's basic law in 1981. ...Nearly 60 percent also said Japan cannot play an appropriate role in international peace cooperation activities under the current Constitution.

As a reflection of the country's national character, this is astounding, hardly short of rebirth. At the very least it is evidence that wounds from belligerence, defeat and a largely self-imposed humiliation have healed without disfigurement. This is not the work of highly visible and highly placed ideologues running cross-current to the people, where actions are taken not in answer to popular will but elite license, as some — including myself — would suggest is the case with American judicial misfeasance. In answering as they did the Japanese equate sovereignty with raising an army, and that army with the responsibilities of protection, jurisdiction and ministration. As for Japanese lawmakers, a constitutional rewrite may not afford in letter the right to solve "international disputes" but the spirit is there, alongside the will to amend:

[O]pinion trends among respondents supporting Minshuto (Democratic Party of Japan), the largest opposition party, are noteworthy. Of them, a record-high 67 percent said they supported revising the Constitution, while 64 percent of supporters of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party backed revising the basic law. Forty-nine percent of Minshuto supporters also replied that Article 9 of the Constitution, the most controversial, war-renouncing provision, should be revised, while 50 percent of LDP supporters agreed with this proposition.

Both figures show that opinions of LDP and Minshuto supporters on the Constitution have converged.

A political majority can address and enact change but only an electoral majority can sustain it. Well, here it is. Oddly enough, the Liberal Democratic Party has been the constituent driver; until recently Minshuto had been opposed or otherwise uncooperative to settling Article 9's contradictions. According to the Yomiuri, support from a public that one year ago was split on an Iraq deployment has galvanized Junichiro Koizumi's majority. The prime minister himself may be looking to win more than he's requested — he's been coy over the last year and now wishes only that "issues of unconstitutionality" are ironed out — especially possible with the last week's stunning turnover of postal privatization reform in his favor.

Disproportionate political pressure from Minshuto voters may be the leverage LDP and other progressives need in debate, for some skeptical observers reckon amendment might hang in the Diet's stiff wind for far longer than advocates expect. But that, and Japan's slight reversion to old custom — a nod to United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan's idea of administrative spit and shoe polish in a direct effort to gain admittance to the Security Council — seem vestigial to the sixty-year-old democracy, and of little significance to the matter on which governed and elected now agree.

The Defense Department, intelligence agencies and the representatives of the Joint Chiefs of Staff spoke on Capitol Hill yesterday. With the electoral success in Iraq undisputed, contention on that country was subordinated to the question of Iraqi self-reliance. A single read of Wretchard's opinion of revelations made in the course of hearings makes him out as brooding but a second or third look shows us that he's concentrating on what must be done to set success in the Iraqi campaign and the broader war even further — and in the distance between place and destination are the miles not yet walked.

We know Allied troops cannot and will not leave now; we know that even the best Iraqi units lack the advantages of gradual assembly and development; and we know regime holdouts and foreign invaders lurk in the country and beyond. There are others to interpret the information on its technical and strategic merits. Here, we can induct from accomplishments what strengths can be relied upon for victory.

At one point, Defense Intelligence Agency Director Vice Admiral Lowell E. Jacoby announced that the number of terrorist attacks on Iraq's January 30th election day approached 300. The figure could be disheartening only if one failed to examine the numerical and political results of such an assault. On election day, about thirty people died and nearly four score were wounded; so one out of every four attacks managed to hurt a voter or security personnel, and only one out of every ten attacks resulted in lost life. Thugs' methods were crude, ranging from tossing grenades at small groups of voters to popping mortars into crowds or near broad targets like polling stations; to the thankfully well-publicized exploitation of a retarded boy; to the detonation of several car bombs, at least one of which having gone off properly, far enough away from targets, killing only its operator.

The terrorists' showing was not physically impressive, and in fact the tally of 300, apparently not released before Jacoby's testimony, comes as a bit of a surprise. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi said there would be a bloodbath; there was none. January 30th's death toll resembled that of a serious, local riot. For their hitman's solecism, were the terrorists effective? While eight million Iraqis voted, about a hundred were caught by attacks. One victim was a young woman, whose body was removed from the scene in the back of a white police pickup truck, and we know this because Geraldo Rivera offered a brief, emotional television soliloquy on the madness of Iraq's enemies. Yet the anchor's trademark flamboyance was immaterial here. Who wouldn't be outraged by youth snuffed out for claiming the right to popularly choose one's leaders? "What are these 'heroes' trying to prove?" he asked rhetorically, and it seems only terrorists and their supporters have protested.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was right to present our enemy as insistent and inventive. Those who oppose war against authoritarians would just as quickly swap their complaint of the Allies not having captured big names with one of not having declared the end of operations after symbolic apprehensions and a long enough lull in enemy activity. Even while Iran and Syria have been fooled into officially declaring their belligerence against the United States, and the time for some measure of action against these dedicated enemies approaches, leftists are glancing at their watches:

[DEMOCRATIC CONGRESSMAN MARTY] MEEHAN: And you couldn't comment specifically on what kind of basing agreements we're going to seek. We'll just have to...

RUMSFELD: I can't.

MEEHAN: And the other quick comment I'd make: You can't help but go to Iraq and see the concrete being poured and not get a sense that we intend a little more of a permanent presence.

And that's why I think it's important for the Congress to stay on top of this and to work with the administration.

[REPUBLICAN CONGRESSMAN DUNCAN] HUNTER: Let me tell the gentleman, Mr. Reyes is making cut-off signs here for you, Mr. Meehan.

The danger, of course, is that those who want nothing to do with trouble will use the attributes "ability" and "complexity," given to terrorists by the military, as marks of failure. Detractors tend not to be satisfied with one argument; "losing the peace" is just too politically irresistable. They berate the performance of Iraqis while demanding that so-called incompetents and discontents be left to fend for themselves. Always is the vaguely collectivist assumption that strongmen are necessarily smarter than the weak. But leftists forget that bullying requires no courage; just muscle. When brute force is checked, bullies turn back into cowards. Jim Dunnigan:

[D]ay by day, more cell phone tips come into the police from Sunni Arabs. The calls report suspicious activities, possible suicide bombers or gunmen. These tips are also the result of fear. Most of the victims of the suicide bomb attacks have been Iraqis, often Sunni Arabs. Calling the cops also means reporting all manner of criminal behavior. Thieves, kidnappers and gangsters of all descriptions prowl Sunni Arab areas. The relative lack of police has made Sunni Arab neighborhoods gangster friendly, and the locals want to change it. With their new cell phones, they now have a weapon.

Like the election, the Iraqi display of bravery is empirically what used to be conceptual. Some on the left are forcing themselves to publicly consider that maybe the president's greater goal in Iraq was, as in Afghanistan, to prevent any future international threat by fostering democracy; that maybe the Iraqi people would by nature respond enthusiastically and fearlessly; that maybe appeasing dictatorship was as wise as quarantining disease with burlap sacks; and that maybe, just maybe, the threat of international conflict can be solved by removing dictatorships, and that such a repudiation of animal strength is the zenith of every culture.

Leftists will be the most obstinate with that last possibility because its affirmation obligates them not only to intrude on the business of authoritarians heretofore believed protected by "sovereignty," but to ensure those afflicted nations a polity resembling America's, the country the left lives to denigrate. So we've begun to see a rather reluctant "okay" from the left on Iraq; okay, maybe Bush was right on Iraq. Okay, Iraqis had love for neither Saddam Hussein nor living as slaves. But relativists — nihilists, collectivists, solipsists, and many parochialists and pragmatists — deny universalism, and if, for whatever reason, they pride themselves on the premise of moral discontinuity they won't forfeit identity. Maybe, we'll be told, it's not worth the sacrifice to find out. Most of the left will indeed glance at their watches and the exit doorway.

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Richard Myers, reminded the Congressional panel before him that military force was only one means to end the war. The free world would win or lose by its resolution of will, tipped one way or the other by intellectual contention and electoral victories; the oppressed would gain and keep their freedom by following the lead of those who had gone before, plucking out the authoritarian strands of their cultural tapestry, embracing heritage but discarding the antediluvian:

What we do know about these insurgents is that overall they are not very effective. They can spike in capability, as we saw before elections. But it goes back down to a steady state. We know that they are losing the battle for the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people. We saw it on election day. And I think that gave the Iraqi people a lot more confidence as they went out and saw a lot more Iraqis going to the polls. And the insurgents were certainly set back by that phenomenon, as they were in Afghanistan and as we see now, the Taliban and Afghanistan wanting to come and rejoin the political process.

...[I]t's an important issue. And I'd say the insurgent's future is absolutely bleak.

Americans and their allies made the Assembly elections possible. But no one but Iraqis can claim credit for success — which is how those of us who wish to see others adopting our values intended it. The hundreds of murders since Fardus Square, the Bloody April of 2004, the continuing intimidation by those trying to subjugate Iraq — all of it will fit into a chapter titled "Struggles in the Early Years" or somesuch, found near the back of history books read by Iraqi public school students who, depending on their province of origin, vaguely or indelibly remember their parents and elder family uncertain, often frustrated, occasionally mortally worried but leavened by a quiet hope. When we speak of the Allied liberation, we mean the gift of opportunity. Not the gift of self-government; instead the plans and specifications for foreign peoples to interpret and build from. Any graveness in the military's report to Congress was to underline this lesson: while we are tasked with provision of means, the only truly free are those that have freed themselves.

Late last month, nearly a thousand Japanese troops disembarked from three warships onto the shores of Indonesia's Aceh Province. Soldiers of the Self-Defense Force intend to stay for at least a month delivering humanitarian aid by air, sea and land to a local populace struggling amidst the destruction left by December's massive tidal wave.

The deployment is only one of many unprecedented actions the island nation has undertaken over the past eighteen months. Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi has sent a small Ground SDF contingent to aid the southern city of Samawah, Iraq; he has brought Japan into the Proliferation Security Initiative, President Bush's contribution to successful multilateralism; he has refined his country's posture towards despot North Korea to one of no-nonsense vigilance, entering into a joint ballistic defense agreement with the United States; and most notably, he has spent many months offering support to a substantive revision of the Japanese postwar constitution's war-renouncing Article 9. That a nation democratic for sixty years should reserve the right to defend itself by means already available to every one of its colleagues in the free world is reason enough to recognize and abandon Japan's anachronisms, and Koizumi seeks to do just that.

But like any postwar Japanese politicians Koizumi and his progressives in the Liberal Democratic Party are cautious, quite aware that because painful national memories fade slowly, Japan's efforts to acquire the full status of a free country — to be respected and trusted and admired, not feared — will appear to select groups as Japan's having come full circle. Consider the January 24th deployment to Aceh: it is characterized as the largest military operation since the Second World War, so the last time the Japanese came ashore it was for the conquest of the Dutch East Indies. Providence determined not to be a good sport, SDF ships — flying the radiant naval ensign — appeared on the Indonesian horizon not two weeks after the invasion's sixty-third anniversary. Publicly, the Indonesian government was more than happy to receive help from the children and grandchildren of the men who ruthlessly occupied the Indies half a century ago. But some of Japan's neighbors — from the Communist Chinese to democratic South Koreans — would indefinitely prohibit the second-largest economy in the world from exercising a right to assertive military self-protection if the question were left to them. For skittish Seoul and malevolent Beijing, Japan's departure from the Cold War era through the door of constitutional revision draws crowds out to burn red-and-white flags. Even in the West, it is not too difficult — though thankfully more difficult than years ago — to find a non-leftist whose first thought, after being told Japan intends to arm itself properly, is of Pearl Harbor.

Fear of Japan is patently ludicrous. It is a cross between incondite superstition and ignorance, like having not read a single word about the country since its formal surrender to Allied Powers on the deck of the USS Missouri. Its cultural trajectory was forever altered when the emperor was made man. Japan spent much of the first two postwar decades wreathed in domestic shame in doused in foreign contempt. According to chroniclers, the Japanese visting a nearby Asian Pacific country on business was a wary, worried, obsequious, apologetic man who would prepare for hostility to his presence. Japan has faithfully observed its constitutional prerogative for a military, muddled by the United States State Department's "Reverse Course" repealing of reforms from General Douglas MacArthur's administration, maintaining a fastidiously named Self-Defense Force. Great pains are taken not to offend. During some of the most routine military maneuvers Tokyo insists on taking deferential precautions, like actually stripping commandos in a public demonstration of their weapons, exceptions that most free nations would find humiliating and — in a time of war — operationally detrimental. A recent television campaign for the promotion of Maritime Self-Defense Forces — featuring seamen dancing on a flight deck — speaks volumes for the country's desire to be seen as irenic, however sharply inappropriate.

None of this should diminish the horrifying world power that was militarist, Imperial Japan. Only by substituting the phobia of Japan with the phobia of America and the West, revising and excising history, can one possibly conclude Japan's aggression was unexceptional or its atomic defeat unjust — or its polity anything but despotic. Authoritarians manipulated the dictatorial country's Meiji Era prosperity and modest liberalizations to drive a war machine, from government to intellect to the market. Power was concentrated in the hands of a very few, remnants of Meiji elected institutions bound by Imperial loyalty. Family-owned zaibatsu industrial giants answered to central planning of military conquest. The government raised children to sacrifice, hate and kill for the empire; schools were spigots of propaganda, boys taught like jugend to be soldiers and girls instructed like jungmadelbund to be conservators of racial purity.

What was neither a pluralist nor democratic society in its best prewar times became a familiar national concentration of disinformation, fear and brutality, where truth and right were claimed as exclusive property of the emperor's ruling elite. When defeated in August of 1945, the militarists' final lie to the Japanese people was that the Americans, whom the people had been encouraged to hate and distrust, intended to occupy in the same manner as the empire. From former Washington Post Tokyo bureau chief William Chapman's narrative on postwar Japan, Inventing Japan:

[Lieutenant Senior Grade Kiyohisa] Mikanagi thought their [fear] a natural reaction. "They had been taught for years to expect the worst," he recalled years later in an interview. Military leaders had drilled into them the lesson that if the enemy landed there would be rape and killing and looting. The tonari-gumi, or neighboorhood associations, had been told to prepare for hand-to-hand fighting, and women were handed sharpened bamboo stalks to use as spears. "So after the emperor had spoken," Mikanagi continued, "I thought it was natural that they should run away when they heard the Americans were coming. They expected to be treated very badly."

...Americans were puzzled at the undemonstrativeness of the conquered people and thought them strangely sullen. In fact, the Japanese were caught in that most primitive and stunning emotion: an overwhelming relief at having been spared. Almost all expected to perish.

In fact, it was Japan's tradition of rule by the strong that would perish, and the Japanese common man would be empowered by idealistic, assertive and sweeping reforms of a nearly seven-year occupation. Allied forces, mostly American in constitution and command, would spend millions of dollars through the dedicated work of hundreds of thousands of men and women bestowing on Japanese the means to enjoy their natural right to liberty.

A populace largely ignorant of America and freedom progressed further in one decade than one millenium. The malignance of despotism was reversed, the accompanying dearth of liberalism remedied. Sixty years later we find Japan as a benign, fascinating, moral, industrious nation striving to accomplish out of the philanthropic ambition native to every robust democracy. The Japanese face their own doubt — and bigotry from foreigners who generally live less freely than they do. But little else.

What matters is that the old Japan, with the old Germany and others, was put down and interred beneath a liberal foundation. Dictatorship's perversion of man is as primeval as it is impermanent.

But the rule of force is primeval — when a nation begins to govern itself by popular consent, it must abandon a culture thick with traditions of strength, bloodline and violence. And dictatorship perverts. As I recently argued, false worlds created by strongmen can seem very real indeed, or at least the prime of public opinion: enforced in thought by repeating propaganda while shutting out all external sources of information, enforced in deed for those who suspect otherwise by the calculated application of violence. As with the Japanese, the first step taken by the emancipated is into a reality of which they knew little or nothing. On March 24, 2003, the West discovered another despot's captive population made to fear their liberators:

Iraqi soldiers have been told they will be injected with poison if captured by British or American troops, it emerged today. US forces have tried to counter Iraqi propaganda by carrying out mass leaflet drops, saying anyone who surrenders will be treated well.

But a British medic who has been acting as an interpreter for injured prisoners of war said the men were still "completely terrified" and believed they would be executed. They could have been kept in sanitised barracks and never shown the US leaflets, he said. Captain Wassim Slim, who was born in Saudi Arabia but educated in Britain and speaks fluent Arabic, said: "They are completely terrified, they have been fed a lot of stuff about what will happen to them if they are captured."

The analogy between Japan and Iraq is not a close one, nor does it need to be. Germany was as unlike Japan as either Axis nation is to Iraq; both postwar reclamations succeeded. Conceptually, democratization is universal. I have contended that there are two campaigns in Iraq; one that resembles reconstruction following the Second World War and one that is unique, thanks to the basest form of thuggery that resides in most of the Near East. The first is a matter of the Iraqi people simply embracing the tenets of liberalism, the second a matter of the Allies and Iraqis defeating the enemies they now share.

Unfortunately, those responsible for the second campaign have long been conflated with the protagonists of the first. The whole of Iraq has often been blamed for terrorism and sabotage; when thugs would accomplish some especially noteworthy act of carnage, a number of voices would introduce a non sequitur, wondering aloud if Iraqis were capable of living like civilized men.

Month after month of growing security forces, broadening culture and new construction should have answered that question; the June 30, 2004 transfer of administrative power to an interim Iraqi government should have answered that question with an exclamation.

Theories of Savagism persist. Volleyed about by greying academics is the claim that Saddam Hussein's Stalinist prison was a force for sectarian unity, a canard on the level of cold-blooded absurdity as "Mussolini kept the trains running on time." Saddam Hussein contributed to cultural appreciation — how? By elevating Sunni Islam to an ethnicity, a sort of master race, at the expense of Shiite Muslims, two-thirds of Iraq's population? By forcibly relocating Kurds when he didn't simply wipe them out? By obliterating the habitat of Iraq's gypsies, the Marsh Arabs? By making exceptions for Christians while Ba'athist stormtroopers murdered Jews and Communists by the grave-full? Yes, high-level Saddamite flunkey Tariq Aziz was born into a Christian family as Michael Yuhanna. He became "Tariq Aziz" because a ranking henchman's religious devotion to the New Testament was strictly prohibited by the Arab Socialists. Besides, Aziz's reliance on Scripture while doing clerical work for butchers is a bit suspect, as if Joseph Goebbels' rise to the Nazi inner circle were Hitler's outreach to Catholics.

Saddam exploited the many identities of Iraq's people for every ounce of ruinous worth, identities that now provide in their medley a fibrous support for the new state. A jingo cannot be mistaken for a nationalist freeman; the first invokes pride in one people, the second pride in one flag. Pluralism celebrates the distinct origin and common horizon.

What have the purveyors of civil war, both the "ever-looming" and "ever-present" varieties, to show for the first two years after Saddam? Precious little. Reports continually describe an enemy consisting of terrorists, out-of-work Saddamite brownshirts and common thugs. At the same time, while the few hundredths of a percent of the Sunni population engaging in sabotage and murder do not remotely represent Sunnis, however sullen, the grace and restraint espoused by Ayatollah Ali Sistani is followed by nearly all Shiites — who, to their eternal merit, stood up against Khomeinist patsy Muqtada al-Sadr and his gangs nearly one year ago. Life under a government that requires tolerance and demands equality of opportunity will irrevocably change an authoritarian culture.

One the finest accomplishments of the January 30th election was the creation of broad-based coalitions, tickets representing nearly every kind of Iraqi living in and out of the country today. The coalition with the strongest electoral showing, the United Iraqi Alliance, was built on the mutual objectives of over a dozen distinct parties including Sunnis, Shiites, Kurds and Turkomen.

So finally, in the days after the January 30, 2005 election, only loons, partisans and loony partisans will even ask the question of Iraqi civility. Though the terrorist presence in Iraq was physically unaffected by the country's watershed vote it had, by exposing its currency of fear as worthless, lost its sense of purpose while Iraqis who defied authoritarianism with honor gained a very powerful one. Credit cards, ration cards, Mesopotamian Nazi hunters, bankers fresh from schooling in Amman and a coalition government in the making: Iraqis carry the deed for their country. From this point forward, Americans and other foreign powers will provide guidance and inspiration. What remains to be seen is how quickly Iraqis will coalesce around a constitutional, federal state; work as one national body and crush the violent traitors and seditionists once known as "insurgents."

And so in the West another trench of doubt is dug. For what reason? Not once has the Iraqi character flinched from modernization.

But doubt will be begged. We should anticipate some impolite spasms of Iraqi national pride as it matures, from public slights to operational impediments to unilateral actions from Baghdad, all of which reactionaries and enemies will spin as signs of failure. We should view these incidents as natural and necessary. Several months ago, uBlog reader M. Schwenk wrote to ask about my thoughts on how foreign "gratitude" to America is often "short-lived." The unifying principle I see among liberated nations is that those structurally influenced by the United States will still pass through a sort of cultural adolescence, interpreting its lessons from American and Allied proctors as it wishes. The Iraqi election saw the first reasonable demands for autonomy. The Dawa Party's "timetable" for American military withdrawal was brash but the Future Iraq Assembly's campaign for proud sovereignty, "We'll Remain; They Won't," was not. Sentiments like that are blunt and helpful to all. Now that the Cold War is over, the promise of liberty can only be actualized when a free nation chooses rugged self-determination in industry, culture and defense: only countries confident in free discourse and markets can properly ally. Foreign troops will leave Iraq when asked, since a learned Baghdad will be entrusted with the best interests of all. I was once told that a leftward acquaintance working in a liberalizing African country could "understand voting Republican" after she realized how deeply lethargy, brought on by dependence on foreign aid, permeated regional culture.

Turn back to Japan, where self-reliance finally commands the national conversation. Where did this germ come from? America. How did it grow in Japan? William Chapman obliges:

The reason that so many of the Occupation's changes survived and flourished was that most of them were popular. Despite the conservative government's hostility and obstructionism, the reforms that most affected people's daily lives were accepted and approved, often overwhelmingly. Farmers did rush to claim their land from dispossessed owners, and the concept of land reform was endorsed in every public-opinion poll of that era. Workers did pour into new legal unions, and the great majority remained even after the American-sanctioned retrenchment. Virtually every organized reading of the public mind in the postwar years registered approval. Eighty-five percent endorsed the emperor's new symbolic status as defined by MacArthur's constitution. Seventy-two percent agreed with the renunciation of war. Two out of every three approved the new legal equality of the sexes. Four out of ten even favored abolition of the ie system, which had regulated family life. In the closing months of the Occupation, several newspaper polls inquired whether the Japanese, on balance, felt they had benefited from its experimentation. Nine out of ten said yes.

...What survived from MacArthur's tenure in Tokyo was what the Japanese found acceptable.

Conservative forces did what they could to blunt the edge of Occupation reform and, under the leadership of Prime Minister Shigeru Yoshida, often succeeded. Yet what might be mistaken by the Orientalist as a parochial resistance to "Western" concepts was instead living proof that asserting consistent principles of freedom produces culturally unique results. Until recently, it could be argued that Japanese public opinion was indifferent to their rebirth under Occupation. That assessment, however, drew more from emotional manifestations than practical ones. In national character, it is far less important to be "liked" than it is to be emulated. Although the first day of Japan's postwar independence, April 28, 1952, is described in Takemae Eiji's Inside GHQ to have been colorless, the country was even then by form and function a resounding acclamation to American work — and liberty itself. During the early years of the Occupation, Japan's embrace of liberty was sometimes naive, awkward or wrong-headed; but it was sincere.

On the second-last day of January, millions of people who lived their entire lives bereft of natural law voted to reclaim its rights. They are well on their way to aligning themselves with the humble architects of worldly good, following those like the Japanese. Anthropologically, one culture — English, thereby American — would have to arrive at democracy more or less naturally to conceive of its practical application. But once invented, such a constitution has been denied to the less fortunate only by circumstance. There is a word for "freedom" in every language.

Down in Seoul, Tim has been wading through the despot Near East's mass media which, to no one's surprise, is chock-a-block with hatred, bigotry and morbid paranoia. He wonders if the publications are a foil to the sea changes in Iraq and Afghanistan and the faint paradigm shifts in surrounding countries:

[L]et's put those lists of small-time good news we hear from Iraq in perspective and concentrate on the conventional wisdom within the Middle East. They don't like us. They don't read or seek to read the good news Chrenkoff and others gather — or even recognize it as such most of the time.

It's dangerous to take a dictatorship's public offering at face value. It is simply not real. C.S. Lewis should be credited with offering the most cogent explanation of evil, or Self, found in The Screwtape Letters, one that matches to the last inch all mortal failings — from the seat of lies deep below to the disparaging remark made on any streetcorner:

I feign that devils can, in a spiritual sense, eat one another; and us. Even in human life we have seen the passion to dominate, almost to digest, one's fellow; to make his whole intellectual and emotional life merely an extension of one's own — to hate one's hatreds and resent one's grievances and indulge one's egoism through him as well as through oneself. His own little store of passion must of course be suppressed to make room for ours.

On earth this desire is often called "love." In Hell I feign that they recognize it as hunger. But there the hunger is ravenous, and a fuller satisfaction is possible. There, I suggest, the stronger spirit — there are perhaps no bodies to impede the operation — can really and irrevocably suck the weaker into itself and permanently gorge its own being on the weaker's outraged individuality. It is (I feign) for this that devils desire human souls and the souls of one another. It is for this that Satan desires all his own followers and all the sons of Eve and all the host of Heaven.

His dream is of the day when all shall be inside him and all that says "I" can say it only through him.

There is a reason why public and private walls have been decreed by law to carry the likeness of Lenin, or Stalin, or the Swastika; or Mao, or the perverted Kim dynasty, or Saddam Hussein. If we were to prove the existence of hell by induction, dictatorship would be the corporeal model: one makes himself lord, silences all expression but his own, hoards things that glitter and things that kill, and shuts every last man he can snatch inside his creation — knowing full well no one would serve him out of anything but delusion or fear. George Orwell called a flavor of it "oligarchical collectivism," best described in 1984. Orwell wasted no time in revealing his protagonist's agonizing suspension:

For a moment he was seized by a kind of hysteria. He began writing in a hurried untidy scrawl:

theyll shoot me i don't care theyll shoot me in the back of the neck i dont care down with big brother they always shoot you in the back of the neck i dont care down with big brother —

He sat back in his chair, slightly ashamed of himself, and laid down the pen.

Winston's sorry lot, toeing the one-party line but knowing better, unable to escape as one man, could be a fiction to many a young, first-time reader living in freedom — if not for the "fiction" being no more false than a mirror image. The wonderful Fadhil brothers, metaphysicists in their own right, suffered under the dominative mark that is carried by all men and embraced by a despicable few. From Ali, a few days ago:

[A]ll we could do was what we had to do to avoid more death and torture, we could only praise them after each murder and each crime. It made us hate ourselves and the whole world, lose our trust in everyone and just keep living a life that was worse than death but one that we still couldn't sacrifice for a good cause fearing for our families fate after our death.

Has Ali read 1984? Or did he live something very much like it? A month before, Omar, thanking supporters for having elected Iraq the Model as "Best Non-American Weblog," was offhand and parenthetical in his own description — "remember, we were isolated so we didn't know much about that" — but I doubt he was less deliberate. Anyone who has lived in tyranny will tell you that honest association and expression cannot be made in absentia. Only they may not be able to tell you that until they've been freed.

In dictatorial Saudi Arabia, where heretical Wahabism nestles and quacks preach with state support, a man operated a weblog entitled, in the spirit of defiance, "the Religious Policeman." He stopped blogging six months ago. It would not be gross speculation to think that he believed his life was in danger.

Yet we should pay attention to what made him take such a risk in the first place. What is "Arab public opinion" but an oxymoron? In every tyranny, expression is controlled by the ruling party, its operative muscle and, in the Near East, terrorist homunculi. Thoughts cannot be regulated, so jackboots work to keep errant words from exiting mouths. Even superstition in newly liberated countries will evaporate when exposed to indelible fact. Just as national discourse in Afghanistan, Iraq, Italy, Japan and Germany has very little to do with each country's dictatorial past, the "news" streaming from Cairo, Amman, Riyadh and the rest cannot be taken seriously.

On September 12th, 2001, a Ba'athist newspaper in Baghdad declared Iraq's collective joy at the murder of 3,000. In 2002, his last full year in power, Saddam Hussein was "reelected" by an absurd margin, something on the order of ninety-nine to one. Ba'athist Iraq was a fine tribute to Stalin — hardly a "country" with more consistent expression in the world.

Character, they say, is doing the right thing when nobody's looking. Heart, then, is doing what no one will prevent you from doing.

Is the continued presence of organized and active terrorists in Iraq enough to confirm their ability? Does it reflect success? I answer in the resounding negative. The enemy's primary objective has been to disrupt Iraq's reformation, its reconstruction and its transcendence of authoritarian tradition. All three of these labors proceed, and their administrators can produce evidence of progress since March of 2003.

In most of Iraq, the daily routine has settled into the common denominator that modern men know as "normal": a home, a job, merchants from whom to buy goods. Even if there weren't killers dedicating their misspent lives to Iraqi misery, life is difficult; but then picking up the pieces left by despotism is never, ever easy. The official document and the odd Iraqi's anecdote report construction, from cultivation of dirt to development of metal and concrete, as moving forward; not as quickly and confidently as it would without sabotage and murder, though never stopping, managed in the most unlikely places. The market is expanding and the dinar is stable. Iraqi soldiers and policemen brave hits and intimidation on and off the job; prospective recruits remain undaunted by palpable risks. A broad electorate is ready to vote, and the state has promised to give it a means to do so.

Iraq's enemies have yet failed.

There are counters: Could terrorists count their losses and lie in wait? For what? Where? The American military's hammer has been granted four more years to swing while the Iraqi common good is making for a sturdier anvil, and coordination between the two improves. Another counter: What about tribes, familial ties and their impediment to pluralism? That's a selective take on history. Society is subordinate to governance, not the other way around. Every culture has manifested rule of the strong in its own way but the mass democratization of countries over six decades — particularly Germany and Japan, the former for its deep roots in Teutonic, pagan tribalism and the latter for its remarkably undeveloped regard for individual dignity and self-determination — proves that, with resolve, the old ways can be stopped dead in a matter of a few years.

Criticism of the war effort, even that which is intended to strengthen, cannot rest its case on the fact that evil men still prowl Iraq's streets and hurt good people. A persistent, mindless assault, the basest form of rule by strength, is what Near East fascism offers. It is perversive, accomplishing the most damage inside the village walls. Once the enemy is inside, reason and civility — found abundantly among free men — are twisted into weakness. I sought to encapsulate it here:

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.

Those vulnerabilities will occasionally be pronounced as the liberalization and greater openness of Iraq coincides with the work of thugs who seek to exploit the mutual faith of free, public association. The gangland-style murder of an aide to Shiite Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani is and will be one of many tragic examples. But what did the death grant the enemy? Civil leadership won't want for long; someone will assume Sheik Mahmoud Finjan's place. The "civil war" spook falters on evidence; Sistani himself was recently quoted as taking a page from Mahatma Gandhi, telling an angry parishioner, "If they level a whole city [to] the ground don't respond." Gangland is an apt description for what one could consider a gradual devolution of the enemy: getaway cars screeching from the site of daylight murders, winning headlines but never capitalizing on these pinprick attacks. Gotham may be sullen and it may be wary but it perseveres, and that is victory. We hear of it often these days (emphasis my own):

While patrolling the city, Iraqi Police reported to their Joint Coordination Center a suspicious vehicle was parked near the Tikrit Provincial police station about 9:20 a.m. on Jan. 11. The Iraqi Police were preparing to investigate when the vehicle concealed improvised explosive device detonated.

Insurgents were targeting the Provincial Iraqi Police Station, which functions as the operations center for more than 300 local police officers and security forces, according to intelligence officials. They believe the VCIED was detonated prematurely, missing its intended target due to the aggressive patrolling of the Iraqi policemen.

Immediately after the explosion, Iraqi Security Forces and emergency response elements, including the Tikrit Emergency Services Unit, responded to the scene. The Tikrit Fire Department responded to the scene with two fire engines and quickly neutralized the fire. The Tikrit emergency services conducted casualty evacuation of four injured Iraqi police officers to the Tikrit hospital for treatment. Most significantly, the Tikrit ESU responded to the scene and secured the area, allowing the emergency responders to handle the situation without allowing it to get out of control.

These responders ensured casualties were evacuated and treated, vehicle wreckage removed and the street cleared for vehicle traffic very quickly. The Tikrit Joint Coordination Center and Security Working Group, a group of local leaders, security leadership and Task Force Danger representatives, conducted a meeting to assess the response of the Tikrit security forces to improve their reaction for future situations.

Both the Tikrit ISF and emergency service personnel have conducted numerous emergency response exercises under the training of Task Force 1-18 Infantry in order to prepare for Iraqi control. Their performance on Jan. 11 proved their training paid off. They responded quickly and professionally, sanitizing the scene of the attack and getting traffic running normally in less than an hour.

Truck accidents on the interstate take longer to clear. No observer can seriously believe that terrorists can sustain four more years of that Tikrit wash. Or indefinitely, since the only involvement of American forces appears to be the after-action consultation with Task Force Danger. Contrary to the disgraceful caricature of Allied troops playing cards until bombs and guns go off — painted by a mainstream media that routinely suppresses offensive and preventative operations reports — the group whose car-bomber suffered premature conflagration, likely hunted before its attack was foiled, will have authorities even closer on its heels now. I entertain the counter: What if Tikrit is the fruit of aggressively pursuing the enemy during the initial military drive, and an exception due to inconsistency? Whatever thug repositories the Allies missed are sure to be targeted, like Fallujah or Iraq's south, and with exponential force as quiet provinces can be left to Iraqi authorities — as witnessed in Tikrit. If one reads certain deployments to Mosul a particular way, a significant sweep operation may occur soon. Across the country, a similar momentum.

Wretchard of Belmont Club aptly described the current exchange between free and fascist with the phrase "trading punches." He did not assign values; I will. The enemy is swinging wide or short, in perpetual reverse gear on a shrinking mat. Stamina may prove irrelevant if the champion can muster a knockout. Is it coming? The best mark of the rule of law is whether crimes against the people enjoy impunity or risk liability. Terrorist cells continue to be rolled up. More suspects in Ali al-Haidri's assassination are in custody. The Iraqi policemen who helped nab them have just been joined by 1,600 fellows. Who is winning? Don't ask those who will deprive us of the better by insisting on the perfect. Ask the millions of Iraqis who head to polls at the end of this month.