VICTORY

The quibblers, the carpers, the second-guessers, the cynics, and the isolationists on right and left now have to read paragraphs like this:

In Firdos Square in central Baghdad, a group of Iraqi men climbed up the pedestal of a 20-foot statue of Mr. Hussein and smacked it with a sledgehammer. Then they put a chain around the neck of the statue and tied it to an armored American military vehicle. The crowd then cheered and clapped as the vehicle pulled away, toppling the statue. Several Iraqis danced and jumped on the fallen statue. Elsewhere in Baghdad, the American military emptied jails overnight, releasing their prisoners. In the neighborhood called Saddam City, a densely populated Shiite area, crowds of men shouted and waved their arms in jubilation. Some carried makeshift flags. One middle-aged man held up a huge portrait of Mr. Hussein, and in the middle of the street used his shoe to beat the face of the Iraqi leader, a particular insult. “This man has killed two million of us,” he yelled as bystanders milled around approvingly.

This is an amazing victory, a victory over a monster who gassed civilians, jailed children, sent millions into fruitless wars, harbored poisonous weapons to threaten free peoples, tortured thousands, and made alliances with every two-bit opportunist on the planet. It’s a victory over those who marched in the millions to stop this liberation, over the endless media cynics, over the hate-America crowd, and the armchair generals. It’s a victory for the two countries in the world that have always made freedom possible and who have now brought it to another corner of the world made dark by terror. It’s a victory for the extraordinary servicemen and women who performed this task with such skill, cool, courage and restraint. It’s a victory for optimism over pessimism, the righting of past wrongs, the assertion of universal truths against postmodern excuses, and of political leadership over appeasement. Celebrate it. Don’t let the whiners take this away from you or from the people of Iraq.