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Iraq. The month I toured the Baltics, 3,000 Iraqis died violent deaths. Imagine the national trauma if 40,000 Americans died similarly in a month (the equivalent for our population). As I toured the ugly Baltic prisons now displayed as memorials of occupation, I could not help wondering how museums in Iraq would portray the U.S. invasion a half-century from now. Will they see us as liberators or destroyers? Will schoolchildren learn about us by touring Abu Ghraib?

I wish I could conclude with a happy ending, a springtime such as the Baltics now enjoy. ss prisons and killing sites are now museums. The huge, iconic statues of Lenin, Stalin, and Dzerzhinsky have been preserved in a rural park, the private collection of a mushroom magnate. (A bird has built a nest in Lenin's thumb.) Russian citizens who stayed behind mind shops that sell medals and souvenirs from the Red Army. The fear has passed, and Baltic high school students have lived their entire lives in freedom.

Try as I might, I cannot envision such a future for the Middle East.

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Yancey's Christianity Today columns since 1997 are available on our site.

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November 2006, Vol. 50, No. 11