Michael Yon, embedded with the troops for the past three years posts this photograph and calls it Thanks and Praise as men and women, both Christian and Muslim, place a cross atop St. John’s Church in Bagdad, a church that had been bombed and burned in 2004 but has since been restored with the cross, the crowning touch.

The Iraqis asked me to convey a message of thanks to the American people. ” Thank you, thank you,” the people were saying. One man said, “Thank you for peace.” Another man, a Muslim, said “All the people, all the people in Iraq, Muslim and Christian, is brother.” The men and women were holding bells, and for the first time in memory freedom rang over the ravaged land between two rivers.

Iraqpundit welcomes the recent changes in Baghdad and writes.



Frankly, I don’t understand why so many mock us for wanting a future for Iraq. Is your hatred for George Bush so great that you prefer to see millions of civilians suffer just to prove him wrong?

It really comes down to this: you are determined to see Iraq become a permanent hellhole because you hate Bush. And we are determined to see Iraq become a success, because we want to live.



Sometimes, it takes a fresh eye to see America as it was and is.  French President Nicolas Sarkozy in his speech before a joint session of Congress did just that.



Fathers took their sons to see the vast cemeteries where, under thousands of white crosses so far from home, thousands of young American soldiers lay who had fallen not to defend their own freedom but the freedom of all others, not to defend their own families, their own homeland, but to defend humanity as a whole.

–

And as they listened to their fathers, watched movies, read history books and the letters of soldiers who died on the beaches of Normandy and Provence, as they visited the cemeteries where the star-spangled banner flies, the children of my generation understood that these young Americans, 20 years old, were true heroes to whom they owed the fact that they were free people and not slaves. France will never forget the sacrifice of your children.

To those 20-year-old heroes who gave us everything, to the families of those who never returned, to the children who mourned fathers they barely got a chance to know, I want to express France’s eternal gratitude.

Now and in the years to come, I hope and trust the Iraqis will feel the same way towards the treasure of American blood and money expended there.