Terrorists can destroy trucks delivering new Iraqi coinage to the country's south, and attack Iraqi National Guardsmen delivering heaters and supplies to schools, but they do not enjoy sanctuary:

An early morning raid on Jan. 11 netted Task Force Baghdad Soldiers six possible insurgents suspected of involvement in the assassination of the governor of Baghdad province. A military spokesman said the raid culminated from tips from local sources.

"The information was pretty good," said Maj. Web Wright, public affairs officer for the 10th Mountain Division’s 2nd Brigade Combat Team. "We were able to act on this intelligence and detain these guys without firing a shot. The citizens of Baghdad are really starting to turn over good information that we can put to use. They are obviously fed up with the violence that the terrorists are causing."

That Baghdad is predominantly Sunni further contradicts the characterization of fascist sabotage in Iraq as an ethnic "civil war."

The sense and confidence of public duty shown by civilians is the latest sign of Iraq's democratic society gaining strength while authoritarian influence wanes. Tattlers exist in dictatorships, of course, but in post-Saddam Iraq it is the doors of policemen and soldiers that get the knock. If political crimes and murders are not allowed to go unpunished of the people's volition, not out of fear for collective punishment but demand for justice and order, Iraqis are sociologically ready to take the mantle of their new nation. So it is even more telling that the state continues to establish itself as guardian in spite of murder, intimidation and damage. Terrorist or Ba'athist, new foe or old, fear is fear and rising above it to win freedom for the first time can become deep-seated in a people. If this course continues, those thugs who are not ratted out today will be cornered and set upon soon enough.

Ignoring the static injected by those who oppose the liberation of the oppressed, the act or the ones who carried it out, we can hear a radio drama slowly approaching its climax: it's a convention we know well, the moment when the ruthless Operator is finally confronted by his former patsies, and he sputters the old threats to no avail as the crowd closes in.

IDEAS AS CLAY PIGEONS: Former Coalition Provisional Authority head L. Paul Bremer took up at the firing line with a commentary piece in today's Wall Street Journal and hit squarely the poorly supported case for retaining Saddam's primary instrument for rule through strength. In Baghdad, Mohammed draws a bead on the "civil war" theory.

Do you pine for the good old days of federal budget surpluses? With higher taxpayer receipts, you don't need to turn back much further than last December:

The U.S. government ran a $1 billion budget surplus in December, helped by a rise in corporate tax payments, the Congressional Budget Office said in its latest budget report released on Friday. The surplus, which compared with an $18 billion deficit in the previous December, helped create a smaller fiscal deficit for the first three months of the 2005 fiscal year, than in the same quarter of the prior year.

Washington is still running a deficit — which may or may not particularly bother you — but with President Bush's tax cuts having already proved themselves on the economic side, we now have a demonstration of their fiscal benefits.

If you don't know anybody who thinks the guy you voted for is a bum, you've got too few friends.

Today, President Bush nominated Michael Chertoff for Secretary of Homeland Defense.

Benefit: Chertoff won immediate praise from politicians, as well as the same parties who were unconvinced of former nominee Bernard Kerik, who was later withdrawn amid the appearance of impropriety. As a bonus, Chertoff participated in the investigation of the Clintons' questionable Whitewater real estate dealings.

Slight disadvantage: Chertoff looks remarkably like Mr. Gower from It's A Wonderful Life.

Still, we might see someone who looks remarkably like George Bailey run up to Chertoff's seat at the table during confirmation hearings and demand to be recognized. That could win the hearts of even the stoniest partisans.

Glenn Reynolds sorts through the latest round of criticisms directed at the Bush administration's conduct in Iraq's liberation. He has always been, like me, unconvinced by the pat "too few troops" complaint. For an occupation, the number of troops per capita in Iraq is very high, and that it has been sustained through nearly two years of localized, low-intensity combat is a testament to the strength of this perennial "military made for the last war."

Those with the strongest opinions can tend to be naturally argumentative, and uncomfortable with a situation that defies criticism — constructive or antagonistic. But what if that reflex ill-serves them in discussion on protecting an infant democratic Iraq from an enemy too animal to surrender?

Could the West simply be startled by the nature of this kind of war?

Personal motives aside, it seems a lot of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's critics aren't willing to confront the possibility that terrorist attacks against nascent civil infrastructures in liberated countries is inevitable, frustrating as it is to nearly every convention of state warfare. If they did, they'd have to concede that the fight against terrorists in Iraq had absolutely nothing to do with looting, or the number of Allied troops, or refusing to keep the Ba'athist SS on hand, or side-stepping of the Sunni Triangle, or any one of the strategically insignificant "mistakes" chalked up by the peanut gallery. And they'd also have to concede that every country in the Near East is on the front lines of — to quote Austin Bay — the Millenium War.

FROM GOOD, RATIONAL MEN: Wretchard and Chester each weigh in.

FROM A ONE-TIME DIRECT OBSERVER: Tim offers some helpful thoughts.

I do disagree with the internal "civil war" explanation. The highest serious estimate of Islamists and Ba'athists attacking the country is 10,000. If three tenths of a percent of Iraq's population of 25 million were the whole of the terrorist force, which it obviously isn't — given the foreign complement — then we would have to rename "Shay's Rebellion," a band of roughly 1,500 men who took up arms when the States were about 4 million strong, "the First American Civil War." If participation doesn't qualify it, can ideology or ethnicity? I say, "no." The Ba'athists — the Sunnis — are not very careful about company when they go out to murder.

I've thought about my reticence to pointed, specific criticism for some time now. It's largely because most of my demands for reforming Iraq were met shortly after the liberation of Baghdad. Once it was clear was the Bush administration was committed to an occupation of the scale and complexity not seen since the end of the Second World War, and would not subcontract out to an amoral, slothful United Nations administration — the likes of which have wasted time and lost lives in the Balkans and elsewhere — I was willing to offer a large amount of leeway. President Bush had already surmounted conventional wisdom by keeping his promise to hold Saddam Hussein accountable; if another promise, one to bring liberty to the Iraqi people and stay until a democratic society was constructed, was publicly made, which it was, most short-term setbacks would be dwarfed by an understanding that the White House would not turn from the objective. I tired of this sort of back-benching, made of suspicions that look absurd two years later.

Be aware that those who yawned at Afghanistan's October 2004 presidential election are trumpeting the arrival of "democracy" to the Palestinians. A vote has been taken in locations administered by the "Palestinian Authority" but because that place is a patently unfree society that has shown no liberal momentum, in fact quite the reverse, the election of Mahmoud Abbas had very little to do with democracy.

We must be very careful not to conflate an election obviously supported by terrorist groups with the demonstration of government by consensus as antidote to authoritarianism. If the Hamas thugs, who now infest Yasser Arafat's fief, believed Abbas would undermine their genocidal plans for Israel, they would be doing what the terrorists in Iraq are doing to Iraqis or what the Taliban threaten to do to Afghans. Over the past three years American-led allies have taken great steps in Iraq and Afghanistan to demolish each country's authoritarian tradition, from the oligarchs to the tips of their military and civil appendages; one can't build atop a flawed frame. The politics of convention and vanity will make do with Arafat's horrid little pit of fear, hatred and ignorance, for which no such ablution has been suggested.

That which your enemy opposes is good for you. Unfortunately, this is currently the metric for success in democratizing the Near East or anywhere else. If strongmen challenge an election, you've done well: that election holds promise for liberty.

The fall of a house? Roger Simon is right to celebrate the respective divestments of Tom Brokaw and Dan Rather but he criticizes the position of anchorman itself, which seems a step too far. Let's grant that broadcast network news, forced (or perfectly content) to compress a day or more of news into the latter half of the Eastern dinner hour, is increasingly showing its age and inferiority to tireless cable news networks and the nimble, instantly self-correcting plexus that is the blogosphere. With a single half-hour slot in an entire day's programming, a headline news host on a broadcast network will inevitably gain prominence: the Big Three showed us as much last century, and a torch successfully passed from Walter Cronkite to Dan Rather confirmed that the chair was as important as the man. Host broadcast news, and you'll find your likeness on the network's coat of arms.

Simon excludes Brit Hume from his definition of "anchor" to spare him undue criticism, but this risks short-changing Hume. The former ABC News journalist and chief White House correspondent does, after all, host an eponymous television program that runs the whole dinner hour. His duties — introduction, interviewing, moderating — aren't any different than his broadcast contemporaries'. If we're to trust the dictionary, to "anchor" is "to narrate or coordinate (a newscast)."

Hume stands apart from the broadcast triumvirate for reasons other than what Simon has chosen. I offer three; two objective and the third subjective, though compelling. First, simply by virtue of working on a 24-hour network, Brit is one of over a dozen men and women hosting news programs outside of prime time. If he represents Fox News, he does so alongside Neil Cavuto, John Gibson, Linda Vester, the whole of Fox News Live's rotation, and others. Brit Hume contributes; he does not dominate. Second, as a corollary, Hume is not expected to bear the standard for Fox. No matter how invaluable his administration and the field work of his contributing journalists are to the network or the national conversation, Fox News can confidently report without Brit Hume's name on the by-line because it requires a dozen more of his experience and stature to provide a single day of coverage.

Third, consequent to the second difference between Special Report's anchor and his broadcast competitors: Hume is in no position to consider himself synonymous with the network, let alone its keeper. Jennings, Brokaw and Rather exemplify brand-name journalism, the latter-20th-Century's prevailing elite model that came to expect a public audience to consider a source of news more valuable than the quality of information itself. Once identity supercedes commodity, only politics can support a merchant who rides on reputation while churning out a substandard product. Should politics fail, the merchant will follow downward.

Brit Hume anchors a one-hour program on Fox News because he is an honorable, respected journalist — not because he is Brit Hume. What Roger Simon admires in Hume is Hume's visible desire to be known by the quality of his work and never, no matter how great the dividends of professional respect, by name alone. The same cannot be said for anchors Jennings, Brokaw and Rather, who each traded the title of craftsman for celebrity long ago.

Brit Hume, on Special Report, interviewed John Hinderaker of Powerline. Hinderaker and his two associates helped, through their weblog, to develop the American public's understanding of CBS News' 60 Minutes wholesale fraud; and Hinderaker's topic was to be the investigation report released today.

The interview was good; Hinderaker was well-prepared and some cogent points were made. But more important than the specifics of the conversation between television were its circumstances. Hinderaker was addressed as an independent political commentator — not as a blogger. Glenn Reynolds and others have been on cable news shows for years, but usually as spokesmen for weblogs; given the same professional respect as full-time stamp collectors. Tonight, John Hinderaker was a lawyer and a pundit who just happened to run a popular weblog. The blogosphere is gaining in stature, aided by new media figures like Brit Hume.

Terrorists murdered another Baghdad authority, this time the deputy police chief and his son. As with the assassination of Baghdad Province's governor, Iraq's enemies have done little to halt the nation's progress towards pluralist democracy:

Far from Madison Avenue — in more ways than one — television commercials are emerging as a crucial element in Iraq's landmark Jan. 30 election. The first partisan spots ran last week, produced and aired for free on U.S.-backed Al Iraqiya, the sole channel based in Iraq that broadcasts nationwide. Bolder still, the Iraqi List, the election slate headed by interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, is buying prime-time spots on satellite and local channels.

...Al Iraqiya started airing blocks of free candidate commercials Jan. 1. The initial ads promoted two independent candidacies and four slates, among them the Democratic Gathering of Two Rivers and the Democratic Society Movement, headed by former Governing Council spokesman Hamid Kifae.

...Sharif Ali bin Hussein, leader of the Constitutional Monarchy Movement, said he would tape a free spot for Al Iraqiya but could not afford to buy TV time and thought doing so might be premature. "We need to catch the moment when the voter is making his decision, which is not yet," he said. "It will be quite late, I would guess. It will be in the last 10 days." For now, he is focusing on campaign appearances, posters and text-messaging potential supporters on their cellphones.

A few skeptics dismiss the commercials' politically approved character — cheap, plain and benign — as a turnoff for Iraqi voters. But it's doubtful any of these critics have lived most of their lives with little more on the television than two state channels frequently airing endless hours of a bloviating Saddam Hussein. For the first time in their lives (the 1932-1958 Hashemite monarchy tolerated an attenuated parliament) Iraqis have a right to free, personal expression on a national broadcast and a right to elect their peers based on those statements. Their enthusiasm should not be underestimated.

Taking a slight turn, USAID continues to help Iraqis reclaim their country's immense natural resources from decades of Saddamite and Ba'athist abuse. Agriculture is just one of sixteen categories of capital improvement and civil cultivation:

Summer and Winter Crop Technology Demonstrations: These demonstrations are introducing farmers to new technologies and techniques through extension field days.

Animal Health: Several veterinary clinics in Kirkuk, Fallujah, and other cities are being renovated and a grant has been made for dipping tanks to improve sheep health and wool.

Technology Support: The Ministry of Agriculture and a major university's schools of Agriculture and Veterinary Science have been awarded grants to furnish and equip computer centers, improving research capabilities and consulting capacity.

Date Palm Propagation: In collaboration with the Ministry of Agriculture, 40,000 elite date palm offshoots are being used to establish mother orchards in 13 governorates as part of a multiplication program and the establishment of a national register of elite varieties.

Agriculture Sector Transition Plan: This plan, completed in mid-April, addresses the short-term recovery of agricultural infrastructure as well as medium and long-term implementation of policies to develop a market-based agricultural economy.

A capitalist, democratic Iraq promises to be an economic, scientific and cultural powerhouse; the most powerful means against authoritarianism in the form of a peaceful, productive country. Is it too figurative to see a Fremen greening of Dune?

More good news from Iraq. Reliable polling shows that nine out of ten Iraqi women, who represent one half of the country's 25 million, are hopeful about their future. (Link from IP.) And even though it's been out for nearly a week, take ten or fifteen minutes to read Austin Bay's "The Millenium War," a short essay that echoes thoughts of my own on the war I feel more comfortable calling the "War for Freedom."

NEAR EAST FASCISTS, PLAIN AND SIMPLE: Tell me the Allies aren't fighting against regional and international terrorists:

[I]in Ramadi, soldiers of the 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 2nd Infantry Division, currently assigned to the 1st Marine Division, discovered 48 passports, 40 blank ID cards, 500,000 Iraqi dinar and $11,000 in one vehicle at a checkpoint.

This weekend, American forces took at least 28 confirmed and suspected off Iraq's streets — from Mosul to Tikrit to the whole of Al Anbar Province. From whencesoever they come, down they go.

A FIRST: Granted, referenced terrorists are placed in scare quotes and Fox News is likely responsible for prominence, but the Associated Press reported Allied successes.