You're free! Now do as I say.

Well, I can't say that this is encouraging:

As Iraqi Shiite demands for a dominant role in Iraq's future mount, Bush administration officials say they underestimated the Shiites' organizational strength and are unprepared to prevent the rise of an anti-American, Islamic fundamentalist government in the country.

The burst of Shiite power -- as demonstrated by the hundreds of thousands who made a long-banned pilgrimage to the holy city of Karbala yesterday -- has U.S. officials looking for allies in the struggle to fill the power vacuum left by the downfall of Saddam Hussein.

As the administration plotted to overthrow Hussein's government, U.S. officials said this week, it failed to fully appreciate the force of Shiite aspirations and is now concerned that those sentiments could coalesce into a fundamentalist government. Some administration officials were dazzled by Ahmed Chalabi, the prominent Iraqi exile who is a Shiite and an advocate of a secular democracy. Others were more focused on the overriding goal of defeating Hussein and paid little attention to the dynamics of religion and politics in the region.

Wait, wasn't this supposed to be part of the War on Terror, where the US was going to confront radical Islam directly? And yet officials "paid little attention to the dynamics of religion and politics" when planning for a post-Saddam Iraq? Are you kidding me? Apparently, they didn't pay much attention to the logistics of finding WMDs either.

Look, you'll get no argument from me that Saddam was (is?) a bad, bad man that ran a brutal and ugly regime, but let's be honest: the Middle East is packed full of brutal regimes, and that has never been our criterion for which ones we befriend (see the Shah, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, etc.). However, it does not necessarily follow that Iraq will be better off without him in the long run, no matter what. This has been taken as an article of faith by both the pro- and anti-war contingents, but it is by no means a sure thing. Which is better: an Iraqi Ba'ath government or an Iraqi Taliban-style government?

Yes, I know those are not the only possible outcomes. There's also Chalabi's vision of a secular democracy, but secular and democracy seem to be in open conflict with one another for the time being. Regardless, we have now crashed our way through the walls of one of the biggest hornet's nest in the world and now find ourselves responsible for all the hornets, many of whom harbor more than a little antagonism towards us. I suspect as we settle into ruling Iraq, we will discover that, in trying to keep a lid on an angry, divided, decidedly-foreign-to-us country, Saddam-style repression has a certain logic to it.

The Road to Surfdom has a few further pertinent thoughts on our "liberation" of Iraq:

If you tell someone that you are liberating them, don't be surprised if they take you seriously and demand the right to, say, choose their own system of government.

If you then, having proclaimed that you were liberating them, turn around and say that you don't like the system of government they have chosen and that you think they shouldn't have that system of government and that you will not accept that system of government and that they should have another system of government altogether, then don't be surprised if people call your bluff and call you a hypocrite, because that's exactly what you are.

I'd take it one step further and say don't be surprised when they start throwing bombs at you. Are we any safer as a result of having ousted Saddam? Not by a long shot.