THANKS TO SADDAM FOR NOT COMMITTING SUICIDE
I wrote a flippant post a few days ago about how "Penitent Saddam Turns Himself In." Strange that a few days later he would be captured, and even if he did not exactly turn himself in, offer no resistance. Whether he's penitent or not remains to be seen. But he was taken alive, which is a surprise.

Some people have called Saddam a coward for not going down fighting. Can't say I agree. I never expected him to be taken alive, and I feel strangely emotional that he didn't, that he's still with us. Even a man that bad, I'm glad he's still with us.

It occurred to me, too, how unfortunate it is that Adolf Hitler committed suicide. Imagine that he had lived another thirty years, a prisoner, hated, but still alive, fed and protected by his American captors, thinking over what he had done. And more than that: telling his story. Telling how things could go so wrong. What he planned, what he was thinking. It would have been valuable for us, valuable for the rest of humanity that he left behind, to gain some insight into that evil. Now, at the expense of his pride, in the face of the scorn of the Arabs, Saddam has given us that chance.

Could he, just possibly, redeem a bit of the evil he's done? Can Saddam's soul still be saved? It's an opportunity to pose an old theological question anew.

THE EU CONSTITUTION FAILS FOR THE WRONG REASONS
I'm not a huge fan of European integration, and I am decidedly not a fan of the EU constitution. But this failure of negotiations is for the wrong reasons. It seems to me rather selfish for countries like Spain and Poland to refuse to agree to a double-majority system that has the virtue of simplicity and fairness, in favor of a system that anomalously gives them disproportionate rights. The reason the constitution should have failed is that every country in Europe must have a referendum on something as important as a constitution if it that constitution is to have a decent amount of democratic legitimacy; and there's no way that the European way would win all those referenda. Worse yet, if they lost the referenda, repeat referenda would be held. A setback for Eurocracy is welcome, but it only buys time for the peoples of Europe to demand institutions that respect their various sovereignties.

THINGS ARE GOING WELL IN IRAQ
And not just the capture of Saddam. On December 10th there was a wave of demonstrations across the country of which one Iraqi says that "It was probably the largest demonstration in Baghdad for months. It wasn't just against terrorism. It was against Arab media, against the interference of neighbouring countries, against dictatorships, against Wahhabism, against oppression, and of course against the Ba'ath and Saddam." The electricity is back on. "Resistance" attacks are decreasing. November was probably the bloodiest month for US troops.

This might be a good time to introduce some Iraqi bloggers. The ones that I know best are Salam Pax, Riverbend, Zeyad, and Omar. Zeyad has links to some more, but these are the ones I've read regularly.

If you are a UN-loving peacenik you'll love Riverbend. When I found her blog site it was one of the worst days in the past few months. She expresses just the kind of opinions I'd heard from leftists at KSG, aired in the French and German press, or from a number of people in Russia. I'd always assumed no Iraqi could think that way. What's more, she can be a fantastic writer at times, with uncannily good English, sensitive, eloquent, with an eye for the telling detail. A leftist will feel vindicated; for me, an explanation is needed. First, there's direct influence from the left: she lived in England until she was eleven or something and I suspect her family is probably in touch with all that. Second, she was doing pretty well under Saddam, working at some sort of computer firm. Anyway, read her and form your own opinion. One thing to note, though: she's become less bitter, I think.

I was glad to find that Iraqi bloggers do not all think this way. Salam Pax seems more like a regular guy. I like him. Unfortunately he's not a very active blogger; entries tend to pop up only once every few days. He's more apolitical than the others, which is nice.

Salam Pax and Riverbend seem to have been the first in the game. Then came Zeyad. Zeyad was very pro-war (that is, eager for the Americans to topple Saddam). It cheered me up to read him; he's optimistic, he's grateful for freedom, he likes Bush, he's smart. He also works hard, covering what's going on, trying to keep his readers informed. He's also generally level-headed but he had a sort of breakdown once a couple of months ago where he wanted to stop blogging because he was so fed up with the way the Western press distorts the news against democracy in Iraq. I was one of the 800+ people who sent him e-mails to cheer him up. Zeyad is not quite as good a writer as Riverbend from a literary standpoint, but he's a better reporter; Riverbend's accounts are more intimately personal, so they don't show the whole scene that well.

Omar-- wow! Omar is a neocon's dream. His English is clumsy, and his articles sometimes hard to make sense of, but that's because he's thinking hard, thinking at a high level. His vision is bigger than Iraq: he wants to draw lessons for the world. His blog is called "Iraq the Model." His theories about borders are similar to mine, with the same inspiration. I would love to meet him, and if he ever asks for contributions I'll open my wallet in a heartbeat. I would like to co-author a book with him. :) In fact, I'm almost afraid to read him too much, because he makes me feel so right about my every opinion that I think I'll get too arrogant. ("As if you're not too arrogant already," I hear you saying... well, yeah, maybe...)

What's interesting, though, is that despite their different angles there are things they agree on. Riverbend, for example, vents much of her wrath on the Governing Council and the decision to disband the Iraqi army. Zeyad, though much more pro-American, also reversed his position a while ago and wrote a post saying "Give us back our army;" and then wrote about how the Governing Council was a wash and none of them really had a chance politically anymore. Note, by the way, that opinion in the CPA and Washington later grew disillusioned with the Governing Council, and came to regret disbanding the army.

I'm pretty confident that the capture of Saddam will have a major positive impact. It will be a major blow to the resistance and a major boost to the wide range of pro-democratic forces. But things were moving that way anyway, and this will just accelerate it. I don't really understand the widespread impression in the past two or three months that things in Iraq were getting so much worse. What did people expect?

The first Arab democracy. A historic break-through. The Iraqi people are fighting more than the resistance: they're fighting a lot of history, they're fighting the totalitarian tendencies of their religion, they're fighting terrorists, they're fighting the propaganda of Al-Jazeera in order to gain the right to think straight. We're helping them. I think they will make it, and their example will transform the Muslim world. The more I watch the Bush Administration operate, the more I'm struck by a thread of genius that sometimes shines through. It makes me doubtful of all my criticisms. After all, the good news just keeps piling on: the economy grew 8.2%, the steel tariffs are down, now Saddam is captured. What the first Bush Administration has accomplished is massive. What the second Bush Administration will accomplish, I'm excited to find out.