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Peeve Farm
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  Blog \Blôg\, n. [Jrg, fr. Jrg. "Web-log".
     See {Blogger, BlogSpot, LiveJournal}.]
     A stream-of-consciousness Web journal, containing
     links, commentary, and pointless drivel.


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Wednesday, April 9, 2003
14:51 - Mark your calendars
http://www.deanesmay.com/archives/001130.html

(top) link
There's too much to link to. Everywhere I go, there's only one subject on bloggers' minds: the war's all but over. Sure, there are some regiments left in the north of Iraq; the 4th ID is still arming for entry "within a week" to clean up whatever might be left. Saddam might be in Moscow by now. But the overwhelming preponderance of blog content right now is the visual and textual evidence, today, April 9, 2003, of history in the making. Whether it's the 9th or the 10th, or whether people remember that it falls in April of 2003 or Safar of 1424, this will be a day to remember.

What gives me the most hope, though, is this account by Dean Esmay of what happened in East Dearborn, Michigan today. In a part of the world where the anniversary of Iraq's liberation will be reckoned by the Gregorian calendar rather than the Muslim one, it's a day of gladness unlike anything America's Muslim population ever hoped to enjoy in the days following 9/11.
Then I heard it rising above the traffic, that famous trilling sound Arab women make in moments of triumph. It came from a group of black clad women in front of what used to be the Camelot theater but is now a fruit market. They modestly covered their mouths with their headscarves, but I knew it was them. Their daughters in modern dress, looking like typical Brittany Spears teenage girls, danced with one another to the sound of Middle Eastern pop music like the MTV-influenced kids they are, waving to the boys with the flags in the Chevys and Ford pickups and PT Cruisers as they drove by.

One vehicle summed up this palpable outpouring of joy. Painted on the side of a black SUV: "No more fear in Iraq!"
It's been hard, and it will continue to be hard, selling the idea of freedom to a people for whom the coming of liberation is necessarily going to look like the threatening hand of an outsider power. But the first step has now been taken; Iraq will be the first true example of the post-9/11 US policy toward the Middle East, in which we cast off isolationism and show that we have a vested interest in creating democracy and freedom in a part of the world that for the most part has never known it. Like Kuwait, Iraq will become a net exporter of human dignity, and the people in the surrounding dictatorships and theocracies will see that there is a real alternative ready and waiting-- one that is gaining ground.

Maybe these folks in Dearborn can pass on the message, just through their actions today-- that the US is not, in fact, the great evil that they've always been told it is. It's not Satan. It's just a country-- albeit a country that's a success without a need for state-controlled TV, or for religious enforcement, or for thought police. It has no designs on other countries' sovereignty; only on its own security. And it is no disgrace to see in that, as Leonard Cohen put it, the machinery for change and the spiritual thirst. Democracy is coming, he might have said-- to the world.

The 14th century struck us in the back on September 11. Today, the 21st century strikes back, and not with a weapon-- but with the greatest gift a country in the position of the US can give: the removal of the obstacles which prevent the 14th century from transforming into the 21st and joining the rest of the world.

We remove obstacles. It's what the job description is of any manager at a corporation: I remove obstacles so that those underneath me can succeed. Sometime in the past two years, America decided to become a manager. Not a policeman; a manager.

Managers are often reviled and ridiculed; maybe America is the Pointy-Haired Boss to the world, fat and ignorant and isolated in its big cushy corner office. But it's those pointy-haired bosses that turn the engineers' individual miracles and stockholders' dreams into world-changing successes. All the engineers and stockholders have to do is buy into it.

Today is America's Middle Eastern IPO.


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© Brian Tiemann