David Tell reports "a dispatch from Baghdad yesterday by Carol Rosenberg of the Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service" from which he quotes, but doesn't provide a link. Anyway, it makes Baghdad sound like an episode from Star Trek where some earth-born researcher introduces a society like Chicago in the 1930s into some unsuspecting planet. Baghad is turning into Mogadishu? At least we've got tanks and firepower. We won't be trying to control things with helicopters.

From Rosenberg's dispatch:

So far, U.S. policy is primarily to leave the militias alone--U.S. troops are under orders to confiscate only those weapons they see while on patrol. When a new political system emerges, the U.S. theory says, Iraqis might abandon their flourishing, freewheeling weapons culture.

"As they taste freedom they've not been accustomed to for several generations, that is going to be one of the things that they themselves are going to want to eliminate," said U.S. Army Capt. Rick Thomas, a military spokesman.

Uh-oh. Not only do they hide in schools and hospitals, but now mosques, particularly the Mother of All Battles mosque, are lairs for the Baathists. Tell writes:

The Mother of All Battles Mosque, or Umm Al-Ma'arek, was Saddam Hussein's personal house of worship, constructed in memorial celebration of Iraq's "victory" over the United States in the first Gulf War and consecrated, if that's the right word for it, with a Koran purportedly written in the maximum leader's very own blood. It was from Umm Al-Ma'arek, for months on end until coalition airstrikes knocked Iraqi television off the air, that Baath party-sponsored imams broadcast regular Friday sermons urging jihad against the invading Western "pigs and apes."

Does this mean that the Freedom of Religion part of the rebuilding will have to wait awhile? It just might. I hope we've got people speaking to some other imams. Muslims started fighting with each other for control almost right from the start. We'll need to use that to our advantage, working with those who are willing to forego violence and against those who aren't.