A dictatorship—even a one-man psycho state—can appear surprisingly normal on the surface. For much of Saddam Hussein’s long reign, enough brand-name Western enterprises were willing enough to do business with him that parts of downtown Baghdad at first glance have the same multinational blandness as any other capital city. In the outlying towns, the Main Streets have a healthy commercial life, granted that many of them are made up of competing convenience stores lined up side-by-side with the same stacks of the same sweltering soda hot enough to boil a lobster. The residential streets can look quite pleasant, if you don’t mind the garbage piled up in the yard—nothing to do with Rumsfeld’s destruction of the infrastructure, just a reflection of the relatively low priority municipal services had in Baathist Iraq. The hospitals, despite the alleged humanitarian catastrophe the country’s engulfed by (according to the NGOs), are clean, relatively efficient, and uncrowded.

So, when I was driving around western and northern Iraq last year, I made a point in every town I visited of dropping by the local school. A totalitarian state can mimic a free society in much of its civic landscape, but not in the classroom. The first thing you notice is the rectangles of unfaded paint on the walls. This is where the portraits of Saddam once hung. They’ve all been taken down, freeing up rather more space than anyone knows what to do with. A big pile of frames sat on one principal’s desk. “I