FIRST, SOME STIPULATIONS: The war is not over yet. There is still much fighting to be done and many things could go wrong. Chemical weapons could still be used. More allied soldiers will die in fighting. There will be more civilian casualties. Yesterday’s collapse of the regime in Baghdad was a decisive moment, but not the endpoint of the war itself. That said, the events of this week, including the uprising in Firdos Square, have settled definitively some of the arguments that have been going on in public circles. One of the liberal memes that has been circulating for the last few weeks was the notion of how terrible the taking of Baghdad would be. As one Australian reader (gleefully) put it to me, the allies were in for no less than “STALINGRAD STALINGRAD STALINGRAD!!!!!!!!!!!!” Many other liberal readers wrote in expressing similar sentiments. They seem to have been mistaken.

Yet the far left appears, on the whole, to have already dismissed Firdos Square. Buzzflash.com (an extremist version of the Drudge Report) carried no fewer than five stories about Iraqi civilian deaths yesterday and mentioned Firdos only once, and tangentially at that, with the headline “Ah, Yes, Democracy. Iraqis Looting and Dancing in Baghdad.” Buzzflash carried more stories about Haliburton and Enron than yesterday’s Iraqi celebrations.