Liberation - The New York

Liberation - The New York Post's Jonathan Foreman writes from the road to Baghdad, in a piece titled "Liberation".

Lots of fascinating slice of life shots, if the life you're living involves liberating a long-brutalized people.

During the run-up to the war, the peace movement never engaged with Iraqi exiles from here in the south or from Kurdistan in the north (where a fierce U.S.-backed uprising is again under way). Nor did it talk with any seriousness or conviction about political conditions in Saddam's Iraq, preferring instead to focus on the supposedly evil motivation of the Bush administration, the criminal "carpet bombing" that would accompany any invasion, or past mistakes in U.S. foreign policy.

The "war for oil" argument has been exploded ad nauseam, and the French and Germans have made it all too clear what a foreign policy based on cynical financial interest really looks like.

There has been no "carpet bombing," and isn't likely to be any. If anything, the U.S. Air Force will be even more discriminate in its choice of targets than it was in Desert Storm - arguably a campaign in which humanitarian considerations played a larger part than in any major war in all of human history.

(As I write on the roof of my stopped APC, I can see an allied aircraft attacking targets in the town of Samaweh - and it certainly doesn't look anything like "carpet bombing.")

Yes, America has indeed made terrible mistakes in the past, including the support provided to vicious Latin American tyrannies like the Argentine junta (though its record of torture and murder is dwarfed by that of the Saddam regime). But the liberation of Iraq is a chance to make belated good on those mistakes and more.