The American people should be exposed to the gratitude of the Iraqi people.

    The web page features Kurds thanking America. Why have their voices not been heard on American news broadcasts and in major newspapers?
 
    Some of these grateful people should be brought to the U.S. for a "Thank You America" event. Let the Democrats tell the liberated Iraqis they should not have been freed from the clutches of Saddam Hussein.
 

    One goal was to advance freedom and democracy in the Middle East--not just to help the people there but to change the mind-set of the region that produced the attacks of September 11. Before 2003, the dictators and authoritarian rulers of the region focused their peoples' inevitable discontent on the United States and Israel. Now the progress toward democracy in Iraq is leading Middle Easterners to concentrate on the question of how to build decent governments and decent societies. We can see the results--the Cedar Revolution in Lebanon, the first seriously contested elections in Egypt, Libya's giving up WMDs, the Jordanian protests against Abu Musab Zarqawi's recent suicide attacks, and even a bit of reform in Saudi Arabia. In Syria, the Washington Post's David Ignatius reports, "People talk politics here with a passion I haven't heard since the 1980s in Eastern Europe. They're writing manifestos, dreaming of new political parties, trying to rehabilitate old ones from the 1950s."