JAMES MORROW POINTS OUT more evidence of an Iraq/Al Qaeda link in the carbombing that killed an Australian cameraman in northern Iraq.

ANTIWAR HYPERVENTILATION: The Politburo notes:

The Village Voice’s James Ridgeway claims that “the enormous ‘shock and awe’ bombing campaign against Baghdad, now being carried out by the U.S. military to ensure there is no safe place left to hide in the capital city, will inevitably recall the Allied firebombing of Dresden during World War II” in which 250,000 civilians were killed. As we noted below, the Iraqis have claimed that the first night of “shock and awe” claimed three lives.

Poor guy. Ridgeway just has too much invested in the notion of a murderous America to face reality.

THOSE DAMNED INCONVENIENT TRUTHS AGAIN:

A group of American anti-war demonstrators who came to Iraq with Japanese human shield volunteers made it across the border today with 14 hours of uncensored video, all shot without Iraqi government minders present. Kenneth Joseph, a young American pastor with the Assyrian Church of the East, told UPI the trip “had shocked me back to reality.” Some of the Iraqis he interviewed on camera “told me they would commit suicide if American bombing didn’t start. They were willing to see their homes demolished to gain their freedom from Saddam’s bloody tyranny. They convinced me that Saddam was a monster the likes of which the world had not seen since Stalin and Hitler. He and his sons are sick sadists. Their tales of slow torture and killing made me ill, such as people put in a huge shredder for plastic products, feet first so they could hear their screams as bodies got chewed up from foot to head.”

Makes it hard to portray them chiefly as victims of American imperialism, doesn’t it? Not that some people will let the facts get in their way. But some, thankfully, will. Perhaps we’ll see some highlights from this video broadcast at the Oscars tomorrow night, a tribute to the power of film to reveal truth. . . .

GROWING ANTISEMITISM AND ANTI-AMERICANISM IN EUROPE: Sharing a common source. To that I’d add the growing anti-semitism and anti-Americanism among some in the American left.

UPDATE: Read this, too.

MORE IRAQIS:

‘You’re late. What took you so long? God help you become victorious’

‘I want to say hello to Bush, to shake his hand’

Of course, the quote’s from that warmongering Bush mouthpiece, The Guardian, . . . .

“PEACE” PROTESTERS WITH MOLOTOV COCKTAILS: There are some thoughts over at The Volokh Conspiracy.

THESE GUYS ARE ALWAYS BACKING THE WRONG HORSE:

Thousands of Palestinians on Friday demonstrated across the West Bank and Gaza Strip in support of Iraq, waving Iraqi flags, holding pictures of Saddam Hussein and Yasser Arafat and calling on the Iraqi leader to “burn Tel Aviv.”

You know, Bush will probably push through some kind of two-state settlement after things in Iraq are settled down. But given the Palestinians’ willful self-destructiveness on so many levels, it will be hard to say that they deserve it. And those who portray the Palestinians as victims need to recognize that they’re mostly victims of their own hatred and imbecility.

RUSSIAN PRIORITIES:

“We will have to defend our interests so that the contracts which were signed under Saddam Hussein are not annulled as lacking legal force and to make sure the Iraqi debt owed us is respected,” he said.

Baghdad owes Moscow at least £4.5 billion in Soviet-era debt.

The request to expel diplomats and freeze Iraqi assets was “not made by accident,” Ivanov said.

“In this way, they are saying that everything before today was illegal, all contracts signed before are illegal, and legality begins with the arrival of a new administration, even a temporary one.”

He catches on pretty quick, though. Did these guys really think that there wouldn’t be a diplomatic price?

DEFENSE TECH has a lot of interesting observations on precision weapons, war-fighting, security at Los Alamos, and more.

ENTIRE POPULATION OF IRAQ WIPED OUT: I get this number by taking the Iraqi claim of 250 civilian casualties, which I just heard on Fox, and then multiplying it by the Marc Herold polypseudomathicator. . . .

UPDATE: Actually, as H.D. Miller points out, even Marc Herold can’t seem to spin this into a massacre:

So, one is left with the conclusion that if even Marc Herold can produce a credible number of no more than 8 civilian deaths, after three days of intense warfare, then American forces are certainly taking extreme care in conducting this war.

And, unfortunately for Marc Herold and company, the point is also proven that when you’re forced to use real numbers in your statistics you often end up making the case for the very people and causes you vociferously oppose.

Those damned inconvenient facts again!

IRAQI-AMERICANS talk about Saddam:

Alroumi, 44, fled his home city of Al Basrah in 1991 and hasn’t seen his family since. He was granted political asylum in the United States after a stint in a Saudi Arabia refugee camp.

Across the table, Alroumi described watching dogs pick at the bodies of citizens killed by the Iraqi Republican Guard after the Gulf War in 1991. Like his friends, he fled to Saudi Arabia, and eventually, the United States, where he now works as a mechanic.

“I am worried about my family, but I am happy to get Saddam Hussein,” he said. “I hope he’s running down the highway with (deputy prime minister)Tariq Aziz.”

As news spread of Iraqi troops setting fire to oil wells ahead of advancing U.S. troops, Alrikabi thought again to his days as a young student.

He recalled watching televised speeches of Saddam in which he threatened to leave “an empty country — just dust” to any foreign force that tried to invade.

“That’s what he’s doing now,” he said. “Saddam’s burning my oil. It doesn’t belong to him, it belongs to the Iraqi people.”

Saddam sees the country as his personal possession. Ordinary Iraqis, naturally, resent this. Another one of those weaknesses I mention below.

TOMMY FRANKS is doing a good job in his press briefing, which I’m watching at the moment. The reporters, also, don’t look quite as dumb as they did at Rumsfeld’s briefing the other day. Well, most of them.

JEFF JARVIS JOINS THE CHORUS condemning CNN’s decision to make Kevin Sites shut down his warblog. And he’s a big-media guy. Who wears suits!

MORE PICTURES OF IRAQIS CELEBRATING LIBERATION — via The Politburo, which has a lot of good coverage.

IRAQI TROOPS ARE SHOOTING THEIR OWN OFFICERS rather than fight:

IRAQI conscripts shot their own officers in the chest yesterday to avoid a fruitless fight over the oil terminals at al-Faw. British soldiers from 40 Commando’s Charlie Company found a bunker full of the dead officers, with spent shells from an AK47 rifle around them.

Stuck between the US Seals and the Royal Marines, whom they did not want to fight, and a regime that would kill them if they refused, it was the conscripts’ only way out.

In total, 40 Commando had collected more than 100 prisoners of war yesterday from the few square miles of the al-Faw peninsula that they controlled. Two of them were a general in the regular Iraqi Army and a brigadier. They came out from the command bunker where they had been hiding after 40 Commando’s Bravo Company fired two anti-tank missiles into it. With them was a large sports holdall stuffed with money. They insisted that they had been about to pay their troops, to the disbelief of their captors.

These were the men who had left their soldiers hungry, poorly armed and almost destitute for weeks, judging by the state we had seen them in, while appearing to keep the money for themselves.

Such “leadership” is more common than not among the world’s armies, and probably goes a long way toward explaining U.S. military superiority all by itself. Salam Pax features this quote from Samuel Huntington on his page:

The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact, non-Westerners never do.

But having officers who don’t abscond with their troops’ pay is, in fact, one example of the superiority of Western ideas, and it’s one that translates rather directly into superiority where organized violence is concerned. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Dictatorships like Saddam’s — which based on history and prevalence might be regarded as the “natural” form of human governance — turn out to be lousy at war. Democracies embodying Western ideas turn out to be a lot better. That’s not a coincidence, however much non-Westerners might wish to believe that it is.

UPDATE: Hey, maybe these protesters were actually Iraqis!

MORE MISSILES AND BOMBS IN BAGHDAD — and, though less televised, elsewhere — but not much real news. It’s talking-headville on the cable networks, and overall the coverage remains rather boring.

Mostly there are lots of live camera shots of the Baghdad dawn with nothing much happening. Cruise missiles hit some buildings and bunkers, but Baghdad as a whole seems gratifyingly intact. Well, gratifyingly except maybe to some of the news folks, who would no doubt like to have more to show.

Anyway, since the Baghdad skyline figures so prominently in the news, and since I neglected to install a webcam in Baghdad prior to the outbreak of hostilities, I’m instead offering this photo of the Knoxville sky, taken a few hours earlier from near the University of Tennessee campus, looking west. It’s intact, too.

No missiles here, for which I — and the rest of Knoxville, no doubt — am grateful. Good night. See you tomorrow.

IRAQ AND TERRORISM: Alex Knapp has a roundup.

KEN LAYNE WRITES: “CNN is so Gulf War I.”

UPDATE: Bill Hobbs reports that some idiot on CNN radio described Iraq as “a Republic like the United States.”

TACITUS OFFERS a photo-Fisking.

Some antiwar types are upset at my comments below about a peaceful liberation of Iraq being the “peace” movement’s worst nightmare. I think that the post to which Tacitus is replying proves my point — not that it needs proving to anyone who has been paying attention.

Anyway, here’s Worst Nightmare II. Heh.

UPDATE: And here’s a different kind of “photo-Fisking.” Heh, again.

HEY — THERE ARE TOO French fighters in Iraq!

HMM. A SUDDEN CALL FOR BAGHDAD’S BEST NEUROSURGEON. Who could be needing him?

A TROUBLING REPORT:

CIA sources have revealed that several Iraqis are being hunted in Mexico.

The six suspects are thought to have chemical and biological weapons with them.

According to reports, the men have tried to persuade smugglers, who profit from helping people cross the Mexican border into the US, to get them into America.

With any luck, they’ll die of thirst in the desert.

UPDATE: Mexico is denying this report.

THE COMMAND POST says it has caught CBS in flagrant photographic fraud.

KARL ROVE’S USEFUL IDIOTS: This report from San Francisco says it all:

In the Financial District, the demonstrators were of the traditional kind — fatigue jackets and granny dresses. Indeed, around Montgomery & Market, the happenings had the air — the sexy air — of old Berkeley. But at the Civic Center, at traffic intersections around Mish, 7th, 8th, and along Van Ness and up through the Tenderloin, things were absurd and self-indulgent. The demonstrators were of the freakish sort: clown clothes, bicycles, and cans of plastic string. But it wasn’t fun.

At 7th & Mish, by the U.S. Court House, I sat in a van driven by Nathaniel Shelton, who transports patients to and from Saint Francis Memorial Hospital. We were stuck, along with a fleet of Fed Ex drivers, just after 9 a.m., as demonstrators rode bikes in a circle in the intersection, closed it off with colored string, and berated the truck drivers.

“It’s almost as if they were protesting us,” said Shelton. Indeed, the enmity and ridicule of the protesters was directed at working people trying to get their work done. The massive Court House, a seat of government power, was ignored. At the Civic Center, a group of demonstrators defecated. Then they left, leaving the mess to be cleaned up by others. Not only disgusting, but this idiocy belittles the proud tradition of civic protest in our national history … Sigh …

They protest in the name of the working people, but they don’t actually like working people.

A NEW MTV POLL SHOWS that the antiwar movement is out of touch with America’s youth — the majority of whom support the war.