Hardly a supporter of the decision to remove Saddam Hussein, The Christian Science Monitor reports today on “guarded optimism ^[1]” in Iraq. Howard La Franchi writes:

For a reporter last here a year ago, during perhaps the deepest of Iraq’s despair, there is a palpable change: visible in such mundane things as sidewalk rebuilding projects and people lingering outside a favorite ice-cream shop, audible in the tone of families returning to neighborhoods they’d fled in fear.

Iraq is a different place now: The grip of horrendous daily violence has loosened; the government is showing some signs of being one. And Iraqis – once among the best educated, best fed, and most widely traveled people in the region, practitioners of a river- and desert-fashioned joy of living – dare to hope.