It was incredible enough that that many people, a goodly number of them armed to the teeth, could "peacefully" assemble with nary a bombing or shooting in a city where open warfare has become such a part of the urban fabric that the U.S. is being forced to double its troop presence.
I also understood clearly for the first time a larger implication of George Bush's Mess in Mesopotamia:
The president told us that the war in Iraq would help stabilize the Middle East and be a catalyst for the spread of democracy there.
But with the Israeli-Hezbollah war still escalating three weeks on, the consequences of the backdraft from an Iraq where militias and terrorists (underwritten by Iran and Syria) pretty much have free rein is a radical Islamist's wet dream.
And terrifying, because the prosect of a Middle East further destabilized by the Iraq war is no longer an op-ed abstraction.