CHIANG MAI, Thailand -- A future historian will almost certainly view the current tragedy in Iraq more calmly than so many of today's analysts and commentators. As the drama is screened from sophisticated command rooms to the remotest television-equipped hut in a far corner of the world, emotions prevail and the emerging conclusions are almost always black or white, allowing no space for more critical and impartial questioning.
The world is divided -- unequally but consistently -- into camps of hawks and doves. The coalition forces are viewed as "warmongers" or "liberators," depending on the viewer's lenses.
In the meantime, the United Nations, European Union, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization -- all paramount symbols of a multilateral world -- the Arab League and international public opinion are essentially divided as victims of a tyrant universally considered a force of evil and the cause of immense suffering primarily to his own people.