"WE ARE AT A CROSSROADS IN AN ARAB LAND"

A very well written look at Iraq through the lens of Beirut. Read it all.

Americans are strangers in Iraq. There is something both noble and heartbreaking about those embattled young soldiers standing sentry in what for them must be an incomprehensible place. The habits of empire are not innately American.

It may have been unduly ambitious to think that America could pull off in Iraq what it did in Germany and Japan after World War II. The Islamic world is particularly raw about strangers and their gifts -- and their presence.

But the bloodletting should not deter America from the more limited, but still noteworthy, goal of an Iraq that bids farewell to political terror at home and to its rampaging ways in its neighborhood.

The terror now unleashed seeks to drown the political question, to trump it with issues of physical security. The aim is to frighten the Iraqi people and to turn them away from this new order and its possibilities. Where people huddle in fear, more lofty goals of liberty and participatory politics die.

The analogy is not perfect, but that is exactly what unfolded in Beirut.