After just 21 days, Baghdad has fallen. There is jubilation in the street across Iraq. Iraqis are flying American and British flags. They are also flying, in Baghdad, Kurdish flags: the population gassed and killed en masse has their flag flown and celebrated in the street.

Thanks to the miracle of satellites and television, I and many of you have watched as history is being made before our eyes. The images of Iraqis with a sledgehammer pounding against the base of Saddam Hussein’s statue in central Baghdad, after tying a noose around his neck, cheering in jubilation the end of the terror that governed their lives, bravely appearing on camera in a state in which such demonstrations would have meant a day before their deaths if not their families’, people desperate in their enthusiasm to discover some means of the statue’s destruction, trading off the sledgehammer to the next eager person and the next -- these images must stand throughout time, like those of the boy before the tank in Tiannemen Square, like those of the Berlin wall crumbling, like those of September 11 itself.

This is a brave, brave thing we do. We have done so at great loss. We have taken a bold stand in defiance of much of the world. And we have done so because we thought it right, because we do not believe a people should live -- and die -- under terror. And we have shed native blood, both British and American, to do so.

We have done so because we have a responsibility, as champions of liberty, as the richest nation in the world, to help people suffering without justice.

We have done so despite -- perhaps even because -- our own history, including our own history of involvement with foreign nations, has not always been just.

As Donald Rumsfeld pointed out today, we have done so with half the troops of the 1990-1991 Persian Gulf War. We have done so with military technology designated advanced not so much for its destructive power as its ability to limit civilian casualties. We have done so, not without error, with far less civilian casualties in proportion with ordinance used than any war in history. We have done so by defying conventional military wisdom, and putting our own troops at risk, by commencing the ground war before weakening our opponents by air and then by overextending our supply lines, precisely because doing so prevents our opponents not only from battening down militarily but from burning the nation’s resources and from oppressing or killing its own people. We have done so, in defiance of military tendencies, with unprecedented openness to the press, both international and domestic. And we have done so with exemplary concern for Iraqi civilians, devoting money and personnel to distribute food and water. No capital, probably in human history, has been so decisively conquered and so remarkably untouched, its people living, its buildings standing, its life almost all but uninterrupted.

And, today, families are having their photos taken with the troops who risked their lives to liberate them, half the world away, from the fear and hunger in which they were living.

We have not won the war militarily, but today we won the real war. Today, we have the images that show that this is not a brutal invasion, however unilateral. Today, we have the images that show for all willing to read that the cause was -- and is -- just.

If on September 11, caring people the world over were Americans, today all caring people the world over are in favor of this war. When the people of Iraq freely kiss Bush’s face in the streets, the American people do as well, no matter their political heritage. This is what it means to be an American. This is what matters to us. Even our less just wars in the past have been sold to us by telling us that we would be helping, or liberating, a people whose cause we barely knew. Yes, today we are all Republicans. Liberal, conservative, radical, or crazy combinations thereof: today, we are all Republicans.

We must not become reluctant, nor cavalier. Battles have yet to be waged. We must now commit ourselves to establishing a new, more just government with the same care and courage that governed our military tactics. We must commit ourselves to this nation and its people in peace as we have in war. We must rededicate ourselves to the cause of people everywhere, not so that they can be American and wear mini-skirts, but that they can live without fear of starvation or murder, whether at the hands of private terrorists or their own government.

This is the legacy of September 11. We can no longer allow ourselves the convenience of moral relativism that allows us to ignore the plight of the people in other cultures or to be cavalier about their lives in our foreign policy and our wars. We were isolationists without even knowing it. We were so afraid of imperialism, so guilty about its effects, that we stood still while others suffered. And we must not only learn this lesson but show the world that we have learned it.

We must rededicate ourselves to the responsibility that comes with our power. We must take action to make a finer world, for Arabs and for Americans, for Palestinians and for Jews, for Europeans and for Africans. And we must temper that action, ensuring that the means of earning this finer world are as fine as possible.

If our government goes astray in these concerns, we must be no less brave in defying it. But we must not, in good conscience and whatever our political leanings or suspicions, stay silent in praising a good thing done.

It is a new world, all over again.

YOUR ASSIGNMENT

If you haven't read Apollonian Bacchanalia #49 and #51, my essays on the present war, go back and read them.

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