Neal Pollack Celebrates Democracy in Iraq

THE WORLD'S GREATEST LIVING WRITER

Today I marvel, as I do every day, at the beneficence and moral courage of this great country I've chosen to call home. But today, as they used to say back in the first form, is a special day. Today is one of those rare days in world history when democracy, the shining beacon of hope for all humankind, reaches full flower, spritzing the pollen of its righteousness onto the winds of change. That pollen will eventually tickle the noses of the untutored, the dirty, the scum of the earth. As a Kurdish dissident friend of mine, a medical doctor and scholar of ancient Babylonian architecture who, under Saddam Hussein, had his testicles chewed on by wolverines, says, "Things may seem bad now. No great nation begins without rampaging, sectarian violence and massive corporate corruption. I've traveled everywhere and seen just about everything, so if you disagree with me, you don't know what you're talking about. Today the Iraqis are free, and they'd better be grateful. We brought them into this world, and we can take them out.

But they were so much worse, once upon a time."

Serious, un-nihilistic historians will remember June 30, 2004, as a great day for freedom. It will stand alongside July 4, 1776, and, um, whatever day in 1215 that they signed the Magna Carta.

The propagandists of the decadent left would like to include September 11, 2001, in that list, but they don't seem to understand that their time is up. I mean really up. Today is Handover Day. And nothing shall tear freedom asunder.

While I've never been to Iraq myself, and no amount of money combined with guilt-free sexual favors could ever persuade me to make the trip, I correspond with dozens of people over there who constantly tell me that things aren't as bad as they seem. Why don't the media report the good stories? All we hear about are prisoners masturbating each other and weddingday massacres. What about all the prisoners who don't masturbate each other? What about the weddings that don't end in bloody death? These are the foundations of democratic life. This is what the Handover is about.

It strikes me that President Bush said the right thing by proposing to "stay the course." There's really no other choice. To go off course would be to admit defeat, to stop building the golf courses and concourses that constitute the fabric of a free society, to halt the civics courses being taught in schools we've rebuilt out of the goodness of our compassionate hearts. Confidence, measured or not, is the right approach. True Iraqis, as opposed to the cannibalistic remnants of a totalitarian, pedophiliac regime, know this.

Starting today, the United States will have no influence over Iraq whatsoever, except for the 138,000 soldiers providing security, the six embassies strategically located around the country to teach people the importance of autonomous local governance, the Washington-appointed commission that sanctions newspapers and regulates telephone companies, and the American and Iraqi coalition advisers who will be in charge of running criminal investigations, awarding contracts, directing troops, and subpoenaing citizens. Other than those exceptions—and the fact that they'll have virtually no power to make or change laws—Iraqis will be completely free. Anyone who disagrees with or directly opposes this plan should be jailed, exiled, or shot on sight.

As I contemplate the glories of Handover Day, I find myself getting an erection. It should go away soon. They almost always do. But the playful tingle will remain. By degrees, we're winning the War on Terror, a just war that we cannot lose. Maybe it doesn't seem as if we're winning it on the ground, and it certainly doesn't seem that we're winning it on paper, but, as I see it, we're winning it in theory, and theory is the foundation of democracy.

Over the next few months, the terrorists will do everything they can to undermine our efforts. They'll intimidate people at the polls, trying to force them to vote a certain way. They'll indiscriminately kill civilians and call it military strategy. They'll cynically hole up in religious sites and, when attacked, claim they were "praying," or produce the corpses of two or three women and children and claim there were hundreds. These people, though I hesitate to call them people, will stop at nothing to foist their narrow ideological point of view upon an innocent populace. We're not like that. So we have to stop them, no matter the cost.