The governor of Baghdad Province has been murdered by terrorists but the blow should be well-absorbed by the emerging democratic state and a population increasingly galvanized by the naked Ba'athist-Islamist aggression against them. As one of the Fadhil brothers once put it: the new Iraq is not a linear affair, unlike Saddam Hussein's Iraq, where one man "totally dominated the regime's strategic decision making" for two-and-a-half decades. Ali al-Haidari will be missed but his work, the work of millions of courageous, hard-working countrymen, will not be stopped.

A comeuppance for thugs came when a car bomb detonated properly: nowhere near innocents, killing and maiming only its terrorist occupants. (The injured terrorist will receive medical care from the Allies, far from what they'd get in return.) In Mosul, even children defy their old Ba'athist enemies and new Islamist ones, leading Allied troops to a significant weapons cache. Soldiers destroyed munitions and a truck bomb, setting saboteurs back another league. Terrorists, desperate to gain a foothold as in Fallujah by removing focal points of law enforcement, failed again. (That should make it thirteen failures since November 10, 2004.) Desperation may turn to panic, as reinforcements from the 82nd Airborne and Iraqi commando divisions have begun joint operations in Mosul, suggesting that a steel-toed sweep of the city might be on order before January 30th.

Finally, reconstruction continues apace:

Soldiers from Company A, 426th Civil Affairs Battalion, brought electricity to a village in northern Iraq. The village of Alkishki is a small rural community of approximately 250 located in the mountains of northern Iraq. The people live in mud hut homes and make their living primarily in agriculture.

“It’s remarkable to me that a small group of Soldiers can come visit our village one day and within weeks improve our standard of living,” said one village elder, Said Mohammed. The new electricity will now allow the village school to operate all year long, even during the winter when daylight hours are shorter. For the first time in many of the villagers’ lives, their homes will have power.

The success of Iraq is happening; you're just not likely find it revealed by journalists.

The acrididate sound you hear is a half-million pocket protectors being twiddled with nervously: if nerd credentials, smarts and good looks can be found in the same suit, a perpetual motion machine isn't far behind. (No, really: Settlers of Catan?)

This weblog has kept up with others who've set a close eye on Egypt's choice of political commitment, Islamist anarchy or pluralist democracy. It seems some high hopes have been borne out. (Hat tip, Pejmanesque.)

The hints dropped by Iraqi blogger Ali Fadhil when he left his brothers' weblog carried weight: he's blogging on his own now.

I haven't used the term "despotaphile" in a long time, but it applies now. Iraqi Naseer Flayih Hasan saw the solipsist left, contorted beyond reason in its contempt for America, with his own eyes, as he now tells us:

After [many experiences with opponents of Saddam's military deposition], we finally comprehended how little we had in common with these "peace activists" who constantly decried American crimes, and hated to listen to us talk about the terrible long nightmare that ended with the collapse of the regime. We came to understand how these "humanitarians" experienced a sort of pleasure when terrorists or former remnants of the regime created destruction in Iraq—just so they could feel that they were right, and the Americans wrong!

A shame that freedom and relative peace can bring complacency, begetting ingratitude, contempt for one's guardians and benefactors; then a perverse affection for an enemy's horrible plans. Though the silent majority must in perpetuity bear heavy things to complaints of a loud and thankless minority it will always enjoy, as Thomas More told Richard Rich, recognition from those who matter — and not a bad audience, that. For now, we should be good enough witnesses for Mister Hasan. (Hat tip, Powerline.)

Arthur Laffer, of Laffer Curve fame, writes about the highly politicized trade deficit in today's Wall Street Journal:

[O]nce you realize that the trade deficit is, in fact, the capital surplus you would clearly rather have capital lined up on our borders trying to get into our country than trying to get out. Growth countries, like growth companies, borrow money, and the U.S. is the only growth country of all the developed countries. As a result, we're a capital magnet.

...So what's not to like about the U.S.? Whether you're an American or a foreigner the U.S. is the choice destination for capital. That's why we have such a large trade deficit. The only way foreigners can guarantee a dollar cash flow to invest in the U.S. is if they sell more goods to the U.S. and buy less goods from the U.S. Our trade deficit is not a sign of a structural flaw in the fabric of the U.S. economy but is instead a stark reminder of our privileged status as the most pro-growth, gree market, rule of law economy the world has ever known.

Such words couldn't have come at a better time, for across the Atlantic, William Rees-Mogg is prepared to give the 21st Century to the Chinese (via the Corner):

The 18th and 19th centuries were the British centuries, in which industrial, political and imperial development in Britain shaped the world. The 20th century was the American century; the United States changed the world, providing a margin of victory in two world wars, and developing all the major new technologies: telephones, automobiles, television, jet aircraft, the internet and so on. We all assume, as Washington undoubtedly assumes, that we are still living in the era of American hegemony, though it is already clear that China may be an emerging superpower.

Rees-Mogg goes on to talk about apples — which is helpful, as he's found an orange. America ascended and invented half the modern world because it is a capitalist democracy, offering cumulative individual liberties unparalleled in the world. Britain's 19th-Century provision of liberal common laws and an increasingly parliamentary aristocracy certainly gave it phenomenal productive strength, and though the English created an iron empire, it was one distinguished in procession by its civilization of the indigenous and in recession by its humility before the same. Rees-Mogg uses the example of Japan for his own ends but in reality, Japan — a capitalist democracy set, postwar, in the American image — produces three times as much as China with one tenth its population.

China is halfway between kleptocracy and fascism, perilously close to the path Japan took in its early 20th-Century Meiji period: exchanging small amounts of curtailed liberty for state power. Elsewhere on the Corner, John Derbyshire echoes these sentiments. Prosperity under tyranny is hollow, short-lived and deceiving. The Red Dragon will flex its muscles but like any dictatorship its population, bound and gagged, will be inadequately self-supportive, the country requiring conquest to sustain any industrial growth. To that end, the 21st Century will only be "China's Century" if all capitals goosestep, with appropriately red color, to Beijing's cadence.

One note to Derbyshire: is China logical or convenient? From his paper trail, Rees-Mogg is a reasonable man, but one has to wonder that if Swaziland were the only remaining country that could half-conceivably step on America's toes, know-it-alls would be talking about "Swaziland's Century."

KLEPTOCRACY, INDEED: More from — where else? — Craig Brett on China's potential.

More articles of faith from the elite press, the AP no less (emphasis mine):

The three countries President Bush called an "axis of evil" in his first term are at the top of his foreign policy to-do list in the second, along with a revitalized Mideast peace process and continued efforts to repair European alliances frayed by the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.

Was it that? Or were alliances frayed when two long-standing European allies joined a statist Moscow and fascist Beijing in refusing to hold Saddam Hussein accountable for his myriad crimes against humanity, wholesale looting of humanitarian monies surpassing $20 billion, and defiance of the ceasefire agreement following his 1991 military defeat — while deepening grey and black market ties to Ba'athist Baghdad? Let's hope history brushes aside leftist rhetoric.

Greyhawk, serving in Iraq, is thinking what I've been thinking (here, here and here).

NOT NEWS: From the Associated Press, another report that is more or less a press release for the enemy. Most striking is the reporter's assumption that "Sunni Arabs" — and not former Ba'athists and foreign terrorists, neither of whom are either normal men nor would be remotely interested in the new Iraq — are responsible for the murders.

Most egregious, the reporter helpfully reminds us that in November, a few police stations were temporarily overrun by terrorists. But there is no mention of what Iraqis are doing in Mosul now: in fact, police units have successfully defended against over a dozen attacks now. Nor does the AP believe that the apprehension of two terrorists in the city is worth the public's knowledge.

Wretchard of Belmont Club practically led the charge in questioning the role of an Associated Press photographer in the terrorist murder of election workers in Baghdad. The AP more or less admitted that their stringers are used by terrorists, insisting that terrorists deserved to have their "stories told." Unfortunately, it appears terrorist activity and the most dire implications thereof are all the AP and other agencies are interested in.

'SUPERHEATED METAPHORS': Craig Brett has more.

The organism whose provision of a biological function is inferior to another's cannot survive indefinitely, says Darwin. If centralized, patrician-elite media is increasingly unable to follow its charter of relaying objective information to the general public — instead inhibited by self-imposed, self-defining limits, then better institutions will take from it the controlling share of the national discussion. From a systems analyst's chair, Wretchard of Belmont Club explains:

The blogosphere is a specific manifestation — and by no means the only one — of the networks made possible by the Internet which can be imperfectly compared to the emerging nervous system of a growing organism. Once the software and infrastructure to self-publish was in place, it was natural that analytical cells, or groups of cells would take inputs from other parts of the system and process them. The result was 'instant punditry', which was nothing more than the public exchange of analysis on any subject — politics, culture and war just happened to be the three most popular. It enabled lawyers to offer opinions on law; military men on things military; scientists on things scientific. And suddenly the journalistic opinion editors found themselves at an increasing disadvantage. While individual bloggers might not have the journalistic experience of the newspaper professionals, they had the inestimable edge of being experts, sometimes the absolute authorities in their respective fields.

Integrity, while the coin of a free nation, is not a commodity found in markets; it is rarely earned more than once and its loss, by a poor bet against trust for exclusory gain, is destructive to the whole of one's character and usually unrecoverable. Rathergate, an attempt by CBS News to deceive the American electorate that was exposed by amateur commentators, bloggers and new media, will be remembered as the moment when progeny stood unmistakably taller than progenitor.

Or is the line direct? Like homo sapiens replaced homo erectus, perhaps anthropologists of the far-flung future will debate on how medius arrogans was evolutionarily superceded by medius popularis.

Running errands for my local Republican club this evening, I was turning out of the driveway of a member's house, which stood at the end of a winding road at the southern end of town. The road was narrow in the first, and fifteen inches of Christmas snow had been plowed onto three-foot-tall piles no further than one-and-one-half car lengths apart. I had just begun to pull out of the cul-de-sac when I finally noticed a city snow plow truck on the road, rumbling towards me. The vehicle's narrow face and closely set, glowing headlights reminded me of a Garthim creature from The Dark Crystal, a movie that can only be described as Jim Henson's thriller — only this monster was twice as large, orange and thrusting a flat, metal mandible at me.

I politely backed up and let the plow into the cul-de-sac before speeding away.