Let's classify this as a slight setback for terrorism:

The 8th Division of the Iraqi Army in Karbala carried out a large scale raid at 9 p.m., Friday, March 25th in the area of Jurf al-Sakher resulting in the following: 121 suspects detained. The raid also led to the confiscation of the following weapons: 3 tons of TNT; 624 rifles; 250,000 light ammunition rounds; 22,000 medium ammunition rounds; 193 RPG launchers; 300 RPG rockets; 27 82mm mortar tubes; 155 82mm mortar rounds.

Which is more impressive: that the raid netted materiel reserved to carry out dozens of hits and attacks or that it was carried out by Iraqis?

This isn't the Rising Sun of yore:

Defense Agency Director General Yoshinori Ono said Tuesday the government would consider dispatching the Self-Defense Forces to provide emergency aid in areas hit by a large earthquake earlier in the day off Sumatra, Indonesia.

"If there are requests, we'll examine what we can do immediately and act swiftly. We'll consider the SDF's role in an overall government response and what the SDF can do at the site," Ono said in a morning press conference.

Leadership is the conference of ideal and utility, and, certainly, every democratic nation must choose needs according to means and sovereign interest. But there is something of virtue and reward in freely choosing action that will win nothing material for the state. It's a devotion offset to history; young but burgeoning, and strange and better.

While the elite media crafted epitaphs for the Iraqi National Assembly yesterday — "deadlock," "stumble," "collapse," "uproar" — elected representatives in Baghdad had tacked and were planning accordingly:

Iraqi lawmakers regrouped on Wednesday after failing to name parliamentary leaders during their contentious second session, seeking to forge an agreement by the end of the week so that they can begin to focus on their primary task of writing a new constitution.

The less scrupulous left is obviously looking for, and has just begun to publicly hint at, an increase in violence it can accredit — factually or not — to disgruntled citizens. Even the most optimistic Iraqis would rather see the men they sent to parliament settle sooner than later the balance of power that will, as foundry, shape much of the democratic country. Perhaps Iraq's political opponents have the model of the United Nations, a bureau-oligarchy where even the most undisguised crimes defy any clear legal pursuit, too much on their minds: governing by consent brings accountability, and for an MP it's a vote or the boot. Holding an unscheduled meeting, these twelve-score have wisely — and swiftly — acquainted themselves with the concept.

DON'T FORGET: Before yesterday's assembly meeting, a decision on assignments was not expected — information reported by nearly all press outlets, including those who went ahead to reserve headlines for the implication of failure.

Wall Street, tripping over its shoelaces for the past two weeks, hasn't been paying attention to what's important:

The economy — supported by solid business and consumer spending — grew in the closing three months of 2004 at an annual rate of 3.8 percent. It's expected to perform even better in the opening quarter of this year. The reading on the gross domestic product, released by the Commerce Department on Wednesday, turned out to be the same as a previous estimate made a month ago. ...For the current January-to March quarter, the economy is expected to grow at a rate of around 4 percent or slightly faster, according to some analysts' projections. Economic growth probably will slow a bit in the April-to-June period but still be healthy, they said.

Gasoline prices, the Beltway's host of wrathful demigods, are nowhere near the peak reached in 1981. Fifteen minutes before the opening bell, futures are up — as well they should be. "Lose faith in the economy? No, no; I was profit-taking!"

In Tokyo, a decision, a compromise, and an introduction to debate:

A House of Representatives constitutional study panel Tuesday unveiled a draft of its final report in which the majority of panel members support revising Article 9 of the Constitution to have the existence of the Self-Defense Forces stipulated in the supreme law. ...After coordinating opinions over the report, secretaries from each party will submit a final report to lower house Speaker Yohei Kono in mid-April.

The majority support upholding the war-renouncing Paragraph 1 of Article 9, but approve the use of force in exercise of the right of self-defense. The majority also support Japan's participation in international cooperation and U.N. collective security activities. They also agreed on the need for creating a framework for regional security in Asia.

...As for the SDF and the right to exercise self-defense, the draft says "the majority do not oppose constitutional measures." A draft drawn up earlier by the Liberal Democratic Party said a majority considered it necessary for some kind of constitutional measure to be taken. The change in the wording was apparently made in consideration of the opinions of other parties, including Minshuto (Democratic Party of Japan), which are cautious about expanding such rights.

The committee has delivered on schedule with a decision that meets most recent expectations — a recommendation that Japan acknowledge its progress as a democracy. At first glance it's difficult to imagine how a country could reconcile obviating "war as a sovereign right of the nation" when it has the means to, in fact, settle "international disputes," but potential revision would remove the more literal contradition of Article 9's second sentence, assuring the people of Japan that armed forces "will never be maintained." Occupation authorities began raising a military before the end of the 1940s, and today the country's legendarily effervescent culture belies a military of capability not seen since the 1930s.

Only this time its leaders are elected civilians with no designs but for security and benevolence. Japan does reserve the right — indeed, Tokyo has an obligation — to protect its people and its allies from the threat of lingering dictatorships and other authoritarian threats. China and North Korea personify that abstraction for the public pretty well. The Liberal Democratic Party's gift to an adversarial Democratic Party of Japan is not exactly deference: a majority of Japanese lawmakers do not oppose departing from postwar canon, and this has never happened before.

This morning I found a double treat: a Google News search registered, in one entry, a weblog and some of the best commentary from Iraq.

Mohammed and Omar, take a bow — you've arrived.

"Exit strategy" was the perfect watchword for voluntary American retreat in the Near East and southwest Asia. To break and run before inferior numbers of poorly equipped, tactically ineffective maniacs; abandoning the millions who eagerly stepped forward, braving threats and assaults to defend a concept of self-determination to which they'd barely been acquainted; and to thwart the purpose of deposing such manufacturers of horror as the Ba'athists and Taliban; all so easy with this geopolitical glancing at one's watch, the consummate failure of honor and responsibility never made to sound more reasonable. The phrase, a favorite of the relativist opposition to peace through assertive democratization, found its way into the campaign platform of President Bush's opponent and even after John Kerry's defeat, pops up here and there in the work of leftists, pragmatists and parochialists who prefer a more analgesic way to tell us that those oppressed aren't worth it.

Until the 30th of January Iraq's terrorist enemies could take heart, knowing that the political adversaries of the man promising a committed American military presence had more faith in the roadside bomb and drive-by shooting than citizen soldiers who would ask for no more than, in the words of former Secretary of State Colin Powell, "enough land to bury our dead." But on the 30th Iraqis took the day. The impression of nothing but base gangsterism to the thugs in their midst was confirmed in flesh as the very cowards were interviewed. Each day afterward saw reconstruction and recruitment continue in the face of scattered, flagging attacks; and independent Iraqi spirit, long-since emergent, was nearing commensuration to its charge.

And then the head of the American Central Command finally said it: the terrorists are losing.

The terrorists lolled, as we now know, in agreement. "Exit strategy" is now a consideration of our enemy. The Financial Times of London reported first on the Ba'athist "dead-enders" having found their namesake. A Guardian report now details what had been evident for some time — that these carnivores hunted in concert out of greed, a pack only until lean times:

The Iraqi resistance has peaked and is "turning in on itself," according to recent intelligence reports from Baghdad received by Middle Eastern intelligence agencies. ...The talks are aimed at driving a wedge between so-called Iraqi nationalist elements of the resistance and radical Islamic militants.

"We know there is a considerable degree of animosity between the various groups that comprise the resistance and that is an opportunity for us," said one security source.

Some on the left, oblivious to past and present fact, are still foraging for doubt and moral abdication; some parochialists still cling to the misnomer of "realist" they've heretofore had reserved, trying to revive an argument won in practical success by the "idealists." They claim that democracy is not an end unto itself, that failure and fortune is a perfect reason to discount the discrepancy between those in Iraq who wish to leave the history of authoritarianism and those who revel in it — a discrepancy that is numerically staggering and utterly lopsided in measure of ambition.

I've said that "strongmen will conspire with strongmen for selfish acquisition whenever opportune." In Iraq, it is no longer opportune; and because "methodologies are window-dressing," and the greatest power an operator accepts is himself, self-preservation and singular gain will prevail, tearing the successively beset seditionists to pieces.

Iraqis have proved their self-abnegation. The arrival of liberal politics in Iraq, so long disbelieved, its prediction mocked, has received the listless disdain of a gentry press. What of house and blood? Maybe the Iraqi assembly will go off in calumnious fireworks, we can read between the lines; but probably not and anyway, nobody at the bureau would really hope for that, would they? As before, a disconnection from history. That Iraqis would be so lucky to form an elected body in two months, and not the three years once ago endured while a lame writ allowed a certain headless, war-torn confederation to plot and squabble and fight. What's sixty days to sixty years — or six millenia, since no one until now asked a Mesopotamian how he wished to be governed? Lost amid Western impatience is how fittingly Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds have been forced to work with one another; even though they, like the caricatured "pork-barrel spenders" of the United States Congress, must consider the narrower agendas of their precincts. Let the cynics, aristocrats and Savagists have at it. Iraqis are free, and what free men have is a bond thicker than kin.

The heavens still twirl when we're not looking, so those of us Earthbound might do well with a brief NASA roundup. The mystery of Spirit's Martian scrub-down has been solved, and though the removal of dust from the rover has been accomplished by neither little green hobos nor a self-propelled vacuum droid, Jet Propulsion Laboratory's theory holds fascinating implications for Martian weather. Spirit's brother Opportunity, meanwhile, has been blithely trolling about, capturing panorama photographs of subtle landmarks like the "Naturaliste" crater, the Meridiani plain, and a point just outside of the "Alvin" crater.

Our darling Cassini, flung about the Saturnine planetary system, has a new portrait catalog of the gas giant's moons.

Finally, for the dreamers: an extrasolar planet, one of 150 discovered through indirect telescopic means since 1990, has been spotted in infrared light by astronomers.

The prevalence of non-aligned voters in American electoral demography follows the high value many place on their remaining unobligated to party physics. A sound political organization is parliamentary in its business, broadly soliciting constituencies whose many parishional ends can make common cause with the whole. Ecumenism, of course, only goes so far as to satisfy rules of order, and a policy question is called to establish a center of gravity — derived from the party's charter and set concurrent to the majority's wishes, done most visibly on the eve of a national convention. Coalitions can be coincidental, or cynical; they work best when principled. But they must make declarations of one thing and by that rejections of other things, so — physics, again — most constituents will enjoy a cozy relation to party platform while the minority caucuses orbit in degrees approaching apogee. Those who weren't followed can take it like gentlemen, looking to better persuade at the next convening; they can give up for lost and leave; or they can move to dissension and warn that the party's operating resolution is a betrayal of code, or founded on an illegitimate tally, or otherwise faulty. Unappealing choices: no one but a heckler likes to sit backbench in his own party for long.

For many, it seems, a win can come from any horse — hence a nation with two major parties whose membership count settles for plurality. But if one of those parties is especially dominant and the other is unfriendly to the aims of a given bloc, cries foul get loud. And if heated debate appears to be coming from within the party to which the media and intellectual elite does not belong, those cries will be amplified.

Newspapers, television and websites would like to direct our attention to the lament of Republicans and rightists who believe the GOP-led United States Congress should not have intervened in the Florida jurisdiction of Terri Schiavo's fate, neither by principle of the supremacy clause as per Article VI of the Constitution nor by practice of federally instructed jurisdiction of Article III. A bevy of polls has sprung up to show, on command, overwhelming opposition to Washington's actions, with some accompanying numbers suggesting President Bush's party has suffered popularity on unrelated matters. A lot of maledictory souls are craning to watch President Bush's party choke on its electoral reward, and a few commentators are genuinely interested in the results of a majority political party's grapple with controversy; from both groups we get "Republican" and "crack-up" in the same sentence.

One hypothesis comes from rightist Glenn Reynolds. "National security is the glue that has held Bush's coalition together," he says, and "one may argue that libertarians and small-government conservatives aren't a big part of Bush's coalition, but his victory wasn't so huge that the Republicans can surrender very many votes and still expect to win." Dread words from somebody who voted Bush-Cheney in 2004. Still, Glenn, neither Republican nor Democrat, would probably bet on any good horse than invest in a single one. Dissolving the GOP's coalition might suit him just fine. So then we ask: is the argument over Terri Schiavo between strong and vital Republican caucuses, is it widespread, is it about more than one bench having not heard what it wanted to hear? Is anything awry?

The last time Glenn suggested the Republican Party might be significantly weakening at a seam — one between the respective moralism/traditionalism and objectivism/individualism of the party's base and libertarian corner — he was mistaken, evident at the time and borne out in the 2004 presidential election. Statements of discontent today sound familiar to those of one year ago: what the party has done is not only aslant our wishes, says the backbench, but in contempt of the party's own by-laws.

The malcontents never arrived in the voting booth; in November, the Republican Party won seats nearly everywhere. I have argued that political parties can and do go deaf before they go mad and fall apart — and that is certainly the diagnosis for the Republicans we hear right now. Yet even if the GOP is cut away from circumstances and put under the microscope alone, it's party solidarity that is extant. Nowhere but in politics can you be so timid and reckless at the same time: Which party, in spite of an enormous, growing tent, with wildly popular figures standing in stark contrast to base "fundamentalists," celebrates both the variety among its participants and the merits of ideas that become party policy? Which party, in spite of rigid constraints from ideology to racial composition, could not muster more than fifty percent positive support for its 2004 presidential candidate? A party that gladly steps to one side or the other of a bitter divide is confident in the results of its intramural contest and its priorities to constituents.

Is that confidence warranted? Place the Republican Party back in context. One party might be heading over a cliff — but both? When one is increasingly reflexive in its opposition, and more than capable of mustering party-line votes in both chambers? It may be apostasy to suggest that we see ourselves through politicians but Congressional action to keep Terri Schiavo alive told us a great deal about what both parties think of it. The United States Senate passed S. 686 on a voice vote, and prominent Democrats were most noted not for their resistance but their silence or absence. The House of Representatives took up the Senate bill; Democrats asked for a roll call. Before debate ended television viewers were treated to some fiery language from the left but when all stood to be counted, nearly half of Democrats present voted in favor. One thirtieth of Republicans present voted against. Legislation "For the relief of the parents of Theresa Marie Schiavo" passed with over three-quarters of the chamber.

Either Republicans have passed into their own stubborn incoherence, devoting but three percent of their number to a burgeoning mutiny or they — like unreconstructed leftist Ralph Nader, who last week publicly denounced the "profound injustice" suffered by Terri Schiavo and bid Florida Governor Jeb Bush preserve the woman's life under any legal auspice — have a mind as to what most people want. There's an uncontrived breadth to those trying to keep Terri Schiavo alive, one that resembles the alliance for President Bush's reelection. In the first moments after the voice vote, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist thanked Democrats Harry Reid, Tom Harkin and Kent Conrad "for their dedication in shepherding this legislation. This is bipartisan, bicameral legislation."

Why fum’th in fight the Gentiles spite
In fury raging stout?
Why tak’th in hand the people fond,
Vain things to bring about?
The kings arise, the lords devise,
In counsels met thereto,
Against the Lord, with false accord,
Against His Christ they go

— Thomas Tallis, Third Tune for Archbishop Parker's Psalter