"IT IS CLEAR AMERICA IS ON THE RIGHT SIDE"

Before flying here, new recruits to the occupation staff get briefed by an American colonel in Kuwait City: "You are going to be helping to rebuild a nation. I can't think of anything more honorable than that," he tells them. "We won the war, and we're going to win the peace, regardless of anything you may see in the news media."...

And are they winning the peace? A short answer: More than you might think, less than you might have hoped. Daily life in much of the country is back to something like normal. In Shiite towns south of Baghdad, people bustle through crowded markets to buy dates and pomegranates with nary an American soldier in sight. Traffic in Baghdad is heavy, and used cars from Jordan and Kuwait are flowing into Iraq for resale. Representative councils are at work in neighborhoods, towns and cities, and at the national level Iraqi Cabinet ministers from every ethnic group are shaping their 2004 budgets. Street crime is down, and newly trained Iraqi police are increasingly visible...

Given the challenge, the skepticism back in Washington is understandable. But from here much of the Washington debate sounds oddly beside the point. Last week, for example, Democratic Sen. Jay Rockefeller, speaking with a kind of I-told-you-so weariness, responded to an attack on U.S. headquarters in Baghdad by saying America may be fighting the wrong war.

That may be true; years from now we may shake our heads at the hubris or naivete of that colonel in Kuwait. Yet it seems, at a minimum, awfully early for such a conclusion. From here one would wish that the debate back home would focus a bit more on how to make the venture succeed rather than on why it was a mistake and bound to fail.

For whether or not you believe this was the wrong war, it is clear that America is on the right side. Failure would delight not only the Saddam Hussein henchmen and al Qaeda terrorists battling American troops but also the ayatollahs of Iran, the wahhabis of Saudi Arabia, the secret police of Syria. And the losers would be many -- among them the people of Iraq, most of whom want nothing more than to be part of a peaceful, free and stable nation.