Iraq | The Week

For Iraqis such as 'œMrs. Abbas,' liberation has been a mixed blessing, said Susannah Nesmith in The Philadelphia Inquirer. With Saddam Hussein gone, the middle-aged Baghdad woman no longer worries that her husband or family will be arrested for speaking their minds. A modicum of cash has allowed her to start her own home baking business. Cell phones, satellite TV, and other once unknown luxuries connect her to the outside world. But she's afraid to give her real name, and as she peers from her window, 'œlooking for a child not yet back from school, all her fears—car bombs, misguided mortars, kidnappings—come rushing back.' She sighs. 'œAt home, it's better now. But outside, no, it's very bad.'

Two years after the U.S. invasion began with 'œshock and awe,' said Tim Harper in the Toronto Star, Iraq is a land of jarring contrasts. 'œOn the negative side, the numbers are stark.' The war has cost $300 billion, more than 1,500 American lives, and as many as 46,000 Iraqi lives. An insurgency that may number as many as 20,000 rebels continues to murder scores of people every week. Basic services like electricity and water remain spotty, and most of the population relies on aid agencies for food. Oil output is still not up to prewar levels. Yet the country's recent elections have given millions a sense of power and optimism. Free expression is flourishing. Crushing poverty remains, but the middle class is rapidly recovering ground lost to 12 years of sanctions. Add it all up, said Thanassis Cambanis in The Boston Globe, and you're left with 'œa daily hell that somehow still bristles with hope.'

That hope is the real story of Iraq, said Charles Krauthammer in The Washington Post. Before the war, President Bush's critics on the left insisted that Arabs had no interest in freedom or capacity for democratic self-rule; their Islamic culture, said the cynics, 'œmade them love their chains.' But 8 million people voted in Iraq's first real election, inspiring Muslims throughout the world to speak out against their corrupt, brutal regimes. Now we know that America's 'œsimpleton cowboy' was right, and that the Eurosnobs and American liberals' 'œpatronizing, quasicolonialist view of the benighted Arabs' was utterly wrong. As Iraqis, Egyptians, and Lebanese clamor for freedom, opponents of the war are now 'œshamed.'

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Hardly, said The New York Times in an editorial. The president and his supporters have a very selective standard for assessing the costs and benefits of this war. They now conveniently forget that Bush invaded Iraq on a false premise; Saddam's 'œweapons of mass destruction' did not exist. Today, rather than thank us for ousting Saddam, most Iraqis have come to bitterly resent the U.S. There, and throughout the Arab world, images of Abu Ghraib and dead Iraqi civilians have deepened the resentment of American power. Who knows how many angry young men this war has radicalized and put on the path to terrorism? And let's not forget Iran and North Korea: Both rogue nations have concluded that the only safeguard against an American invasion is to acquire nuclear weapons. So much for making the world safer.

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