Case in point. Were things going badly when we had to endure the Bataan Death March? The slaughterhouses known as Iwo Jima and Guadalcanal? The rivers of blood at the Normandy Landing? The dreadfully murderous impasse at Monte Cassino in Italy? The sudden reversal of military momentum called the Battle of the Bulge? The hemorrhaging of the Eighth Air Force over Germany where the chance of survival of our gallant airmen was only one in three? The labyrinths of death navigated by our guys in the hedgerows of France?

So are things going badly in Iraq? Compared to what?

Now I can only guess that the news media Monday-morning-quarterbacks believe that things are going badly in Iraq because American lives are being lost almost daily in that country.

And, indeed, they are. And, indeed, I weep because of it.

You know, for whatever it’s worth, one of the worst nights of my life was my first night in an Army hospital on Guam to which I had been flown from Okinawa a few months after the invasion.

(I think it’s important for you to know that I hadn’t been hit by enemy fire, although my unit and I had been under continual attack. The purpose of my evacuation was to prevent the worsening of what was already a serious vision problem.)

I couldn’t sleep. Some thirty badly wounded boys — teenagers or in their early twenties — were moaning pitifully in pain, calling tearfully and pleadingly in the dark for their mothers to hold them. I cried ‘til daybreak. Heartbroken.

So I’m not being a hero with the lives of other people’s sons or daughters when I say that things are going astonishingly well in Iraq.

You see, something extraordinary is also happening in that country because of the sacrifices that these kids and the Iraqi people themselves are making — a democracy is being born! And in a country where the people have never known anything but political slavery of one kind or another.

You know, we as a people agonized in World War II to preserve the democracy our ancestors had bled to create for us. And we’re now doing in Iraq what we Americans do so well — let a formerly enslaved people kindle their seedlings of freedom from our brightly, blazing torch of liberty.

For reasons known only to the Almighty, this country is the keeper of the Flame. And we can no more escape our destiny than we can escape returning to the bosom of the Divine One when the time for that transformation arrives.

In this case, we’re helping the Iraqis spark a political chain reaction that’s sure to spread until it clothes the entire Middle East with the blessings of self-determination and self-government. Like the yeast, which, in one of Jesus’s parables, a woman took and hid in three measures of flour, until it was all leavened.

Going badly. Indeed!

Think about it.