Any major event, negative or positive, opens up both negative and positive possibilities, both predictable and unpredictable. For example, the 9/11 attacks and the war on Afghanistan brought the current anti-war movement into being. That doesn't make them positive events per se.
> And you don't think a lot of
> people in Baghdad are happy at this prospect?
> Brad DeLong
Some are happy. They may be less happy when they find out about the plans to take over the Iraqi school system and indoctrinate the children with U.S.- produced textbooks in "Red Nightmare" fashion, to sell off the Iraqi oil industry, and so on. In Basra someone yelled to a Brit in a tank, "Saddam gone, soldier go home now!" He didn't get it, did he? Soldier is not going home for a long time.
Some are happy. Some were unhappy, unhappy enough to shoot at the tanks, and are now dead. Some other people are unhappy about the invasion and are still alive but for some reason of excessive caution, I suppose, have not gone out to engage in this 'visual poll in the street' with "US GO HOME" signs under the guns of the Abrams tanks, but are staying indoors or in different parts of town or in the countryside out of some paranoid fear that the US troops will mistake them for journalists and murder them. I don't have data on what the percentages are here, do you?
LP