Qualis Artifex Pereo

Associated Press counted one thousand, two hundred and seventy-two Iraqi deaths reported during the month of October, an average of forty-one per day. Major General William Caldwell, speaking on a day when even this enviable record of "isolated incidents" was exceeded, attempted to apply some perspective for the benefit of journalists fiddling behind the fortifications in Baghdad. Iraq, Caldwell said, is in a phase of transition. "Every great work of art goes through messy phases while it is in transition. A lump of clay can become a sculpture. Blobs of paint become paintings which inspire"; and of course a functioning democratic state is much the same sort of thing. All it takes is a Great Man or so, to bring the inert material - stone, pigment, brown people - to life; and given sufficient time and unpleasantness, Iraq could one day gain a culture with the political sophistication of Norman Rockwell, the linear clarity of Jackson Pollock and the sunny optimism of Edward Hopper.