Right now, even before all the bronze Saddams are blown off their pedestals, we must begin to put Iraq back together. First, find those hospitals that lack water and electricity, and hook them up again. Get the food and the water moving into the neighborhoods.
But there is one more thing to build, here at home in America: commitment and love. Not sentimentalism, but clear-eyed, robust, mature love that you have to go all the way back to ancient Greek to find the right word for. Stergo, perhaps, which was "used especially of the love of parents and children or a ruler and his people." All people are brothers and sisters; with this war we have made the Iraqis especially our family.
"Love" was one of the favorite words of the street demonstrators in the Vietnam era. I haven't seen so much of it in this incarnation of the anti-war movement, which seems venomous and bitter. Where to start? How to move from the gritted teeth of an enemy at war to the open arms of brotherhood? Start with this guy.
So far, we only know him as "Mohammed." That's because, until today at least, he and his family were in danger of their lives. He's the Iraqi man who tipped U.S. Marines about American POW Jessica Lynch in Nassiriya, then went back and did the cloak-and-dagger work that allowed her to be freed.
"A person, no matter his nationality, is a human being," Mohammed said afterward. He's 32. He's a lawyer whose wife was a nurse at the hospital. He speaks a "broken but expressive English" learned at Basra University, according to reporters who have interviewed him, and he smiles often.
Mohammed walked into the Saddam Hospital last Friday to visit his wife and was told by a doctor friend that an American woman POW was in the emergency ward. He saw her through a window in the ground-floor ward, which had been taken over by the Saddam Fedayeen at the start of the war. Her head was bandaged, her right arm hung in a sling over a white blanket and she looked like she'd been shot in the leg. But her immediate problem was the black-uniformed fedayeen commander leaning over her.
The man was slapping her. "One, two," Mohammed said, chopping his hand back and forth. There's a street slang term for that kind of treatment: it's called a bitch-slap.
"My heart cut," Mohammed said, explaining that moment later. "There, I have decided to go to Americans to give them important information about the woman prisoner." He walked into her room with his doctor friend. "I said 'Good morning.' She thought I was a doctor. I say, 'Don't worry.' "
Mohammed told his wife to take their 6-year-old daughter to his father's house and lay low. Then he set off on foot to find the American troops, six miles away, on the fringes of Nassiriya.
"This was very dangerous for me because American soldiers shoot," he said. He held his hands high to show how he carefully approached the Marines. He told them about the prisoner. They asked him to return to the six-story hospital and scout its layout and report back whether a helicopter could land on its roof. He walked back, even as U.S. jets bombed parts of the city. "Boom, boom. I walked under bombs. Fire, fire," Mohammed recalled.
He ran the same gauntlet the next day to find the Marines. He told them there were 41 fedayeen at the hospital, with four guarding Lynch's room in civilian clothes, armed with AK-47 assault rifles and carrying radios. "I drew them a map. I drew them five maps," he said.
His precautions about his family proved wise. The fedayeen raided his house the next day, taking all his possessions and even his Russian-made Muscovitch car. He said a neighbor was shot and her body dragged through the streets just for waving at a U.S. helicopter. "Very bad people," he said. "There is no kindness in my heart for them."
He got his family out of Nassiriya on Tuesday night, hours before a task force of U.S. commandos rescued Lynch.
"I am very happy," he said. It's not the words you'd expect from a man who now owns just the clothes he's wearing. He said his wife wants to work in a hospital helping Americans. He said he's eager to help the Marines any way he can until he can return home to Nassiriya and resume his normal life.
Squabbles will flare in months to come about separating humanitarian relief from military occupation. There will be scandals about the rush for reconstruction contracts and who controls the oil.
But keep your eye on the real prize: a stable, prosperous Iraq whose citizens enjoy good lives. A nation where people participate in their government. An economy that is self-sustained, boosted by oil but not dependent on it. A model for the Arab world.
As Hamish McRae wrote yesterday in "The Independent," "It may seem strange to say it now, with the bombs and bullets still flying, but potentially Iraq is, in economic terms, the Arab world's best chance. It has the economic breadth of a country such as Morocco or Egypt, but it has the oil wealth of the Gulf states and Saudi Arabia. It could become a huge economic success story. It is massively in the interest of the world that it should be so."
Learn from Mohammed: see things as they ought to be, and live to make them that way.
A story is told in history books of Sidon, one of the Phoenician ports conquered by Alexander the Great. He sent his trusted friend Hephaestion to find a new governor for the city. Hephaestion walked all through the town with one of the leading citizens, looking over the place, talking of this man or that who might suit the job. Then they passed a well-kept garden.
Whose is this, Hephaestion asked. He was told it belonged to a humble gardener, who, when the Persians came one day and were about to destroy it, stood at the gate and said, "whoever would harm this garden must first dirty his soul with my blood." Hephaestion, it is said, looked no further for a ruler for that city.