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My what a day! As I drove back to Ocala from Lecanto today I listened intently to the radio as the scene in downtown Baghdad was described. The crowd was gathering around this symbol of this ruthless dictator who had ruled with an iron fist for years. I drove quickly, hoping to get to a TV to watch this momentous occasion as his image, and the iron noose on the Iraqi people came tumbling down. Alas, I didn't get to see it live, but to watch the video affected me all the same. Though there is much work to be done, there will still be skirmishes, there will still be death, but Saddam is done with his dirty work in Iraq. Mohammed Aldouri, the Iraqi ambassador to the UN said, "There are winners and there are losers." Then, "The game is over, my hope for the Iraqi people is for peace." To Shepherd Smith on FoxNews, and to me, this sounds like capitulation. The Washington Post headline is, "Baghdad Falls". I prefer mine.

Chuck Colson quotes the 19th century Russian novelist Dostoyevsky who asked, essentially, "Can man be good without God?" Colson's answer, "in every age, the answer has been no. Without the restraining influence on their nature, men will destroy themselves. That restraining influence might take many abstract forms, as it did for the Greeks and Romans, or it may be the God of the Old and the New Testaments. But it has always served the same purpose."

As the iron grip of Saddam has been loosed from the necks of the Iraqi people we have seen a society break down and chaos rule. To be sure, this is not the majority of the Iraqi people, yet, without civil authority, and in the absence of moral authority, the base nature of man rises to the surface.

Before we get too critical of the people of Iraq, we need to examine our own country. I find it interesting that just last week a Justice Department report was released citing a record 2.1 million inmates in our nations prisons. Why is this? Colson posits that in the absence of an individual moral authority, God has designed that man must set up a restraining civil authority and enforce moral behavior. Our prison populations are the outcome.

At least one in one in every 142 residents of the US cannot or will not restrain themselves, so our government must restrain them. The outcome should we not would be another Iraq like chaotic state�here in the United States.