A CANADIAN PERSPECTIVE

Operation Iraqi Freedom was about liberation, long before it became a corrosive occupation.

It was also, in the annals of warfare, precedent-setting — the first time that compassionate relief arrived concurrent with ongoing military operations, even to the detriment of military resupply.

That's not oft noted.

In time, if the Americans get this right — and they've little experience with nation-building, President George W. Bush actually campaigning against the very idea before the 2000 election — it is liberation that will endure as the dangers and deprivations of transitional Iraq begin to recede.

But time is the issue, impatience the enemy...

Give the Americans this much: In the modern world, there are precious few peoples willing to die for strangers, for someone else's tribe, which is the fate of soldiers doing the bidding of politicians.

Pity so many other governments didn't feel that a Muslim nation merited the human, economic and political sacrifice.

An invasion on humanitarian grounds — deposing Saddam because of the horrors he inflicted on his people, the evidence in all those mass graves — had to be politically dressed up as a defensive intervention, with America and Great Britain cranking up alarm over the existence of weapons of mass destruction.

Saddam Hussein was the weapon of mass destruction.

Saddam Hussein as a weapon of mass destruction? Sounds familiar...here is why.