Well by now I hope we've all seen pictures of cheering Iraqis in Baghdad. We don't know if Saddam is dead or not, but either way his reign is over. So we can look for several weeks of Conservative Triumphalism, and we can look forward to what comes next in Iraq.
Thomas L. Friedman, commenting at the New York Times, stated, "We are so caught up with our own story of "America's liberation of Iraq," and the Arab TV networks are so caught up with their own story of "America's occupation of Iraq," that everyone seems to have lost sight of the real lives of Iraqis.
"We are lost," said Zakiya Jassim, a hospital maintenance worker. "The situation is getting worse. I don't care about Saddam. He is far away. I want my country to be normal."
America broke Iraq; now America owns Iraq, and it owns the primary responsibility for normalizing it. If the water doesn't flow, if the food doesn't arrive, if the rains don't come and if the sun doesn't shine, it's now America's fault. We'd better get used to it, we'd better make things right, we'd better do it soon, and we'd better get all the help we can get."
The next couple of weeks will determine if we are liberators or conquerors. I pray that we will turn out to be the former.
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