Perspective - Den Beste on

Perspective - Den Beste on something a lot of the left misses - Iraqis can't be expected to immediately act like free people, with all the expectations and habits free people have:

"In the Antarctic, penguins nest on land but hunt at sea. There are leopard seals and killer whales who think that penguins are delicious, and who know where the rookeries are located. They hang out in the ocean nearby and wait, looking for a meal. If a group of penguins want to go to sea to hunt, the first few to enter the water take the greatest risk, and no one wants to be the first. So they collect on the edge of the ice, and jostle themselves, and eventually one or two lose their balance and fall in, and then the rest of them dive in after them.

Iraqis are not penguins, obviously, but there's something like that going on. After 25 years where expressing any kind of independence could earn you a horrible death, or earn such a death for everyone you love, it's hard to believe that it's changed. They were told that it was changed, but was it really true? And was it permanent?

There was a natural tendency for most to not take that chance. But a few took small chances, and didn't suffer for it. That encouraged others to try a bit more as time went on.

The first independent newspapers were very tentative. The Americans said they believed in free press, but did they really? And would supporters of Saddam visit the newspapers in the night? It was a risk, and those working on those newspapers were doing things which would have gotten them all killed just two months before.

But they didn't suffer. The Americans left them alone, and they didn't get visited by Baathist death squads. More newspapers appeared and began to be more frank, and Iraq now has the most free press in the Arab world. But that didn't happen overnight"

And remember that the next time some liberal hamster calls Iraq a "quagmire".