MAYBE NOT IN YOURS, but in my freakin’ name, anyway.

Meanwhile Janet Daley wonders when the left will apologize:

I have this delightful fantasy of left-wingers throughout the Western world putting their hands up and saying: “Well, actually we got that a little bit wrong.” And maybe even deciding that, since their analysis of the war was mistaken, their diagnosis of the peace might be open to question too.

But I’m not holding my breath. Those for whom America is always wrong will not be slowed down by this momentary setback. Rather like Mr al-Sahaf, they will not even appear to notice the tanks in the streets of their ideological neighbourhood. They will look away from the welcoming crowds of Basra (yes, they really did cheer, once it was safe to do so) and just move smartly on to the next American “crime against humanity”.

Yep. But not many people will listen to a crowd that has squandered its remaining moral and intellectual capital — again.

LILEKS:

Whatever you think we should do to get to that point, you have to admit that the sound of a cast-iron skull striking the pavement is a good way to start. And if you don’t it’s because you see some other false god on the podium, pointing at an empty heaven.

Men never seem taller than when they stand next to the prone remainders of a toppled tyrant. Someone someday will do a study of the statues the West pulled down. How they all showed a hard face to the dawn. How they all fell face first.

Amen.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON WRITES ON MAUREEN DOWD:

I confess that her writing has long bothered me, always in times of national duress reflecting an elite superficiality that is out of touch with most of us in the America she flies over. It is not just that for the last two years she has been wrong about Afghanistan, wrong about the efficacy of the war against terror, and wrong about Iraq — despite yesterday’s surprising sudden admission that “We were always going to win the war with Iraq.” The problem is more a grotesque chicness that quite amorally juxtaposes mention of tidbits like alpha males, Manhattan fashion — and her own psychodramas — with themes of real tragedies like the dying in the Middle East and war’s horror.

So she just doesn’t get it. It is precisely because Mr. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz hate war, wish to avoid a repeat of the vaporization of 3,000 in Manhattan and the specter of further mass killing from terrorists, armed with frightening weapons from rogue states like Iraq, that they resorted to force. She evokes Sherman (who called something like 19th century Dowdism “bottled piety”) with disdain, but forgets that Sherman, who saw firsthand the grotesqueness of Shiloh, proclaimed that war was all hell — but only after his trek through Georgia where he freed 40,000 slaves and destroyed the icons of the Confederacy, while losing 100 soldiers and killing not more than 600 young non-slave-holding Southerners, an hour’s carnage at Antietam or Gettysburg.

It might be neat between cappuccinos to write about leaders getting “giddy” about winning a terrible war, or thinking up cool nicknames like “Rummy,” “Wolfie,” and titles like “Dances with Wolfowitz,” but meanwhile out in the desert stink thousands of young Americans, a world away from the cynical Letterman world of Maureen Dowd, risk their lives to ensure that there are no more craters in her environs — and as a dividend give 26 million a shot at the freedom that she so breezily enjoys.

Yeah, but actually knowing history and stuff is too un-Carrie-Bradshaw-like for Dowd. My only complaint with Hanson’s piece is the Letterman reference.

Letterman — like many other comics including Jay Leno and Dennis Miller, and unlike Ms. Dowd who only tries to be funny — has actually been far more serious and perceptive about matters of war and peace than that reference would suggest.

I’LL BET THIS WON’T GO ON AL JAZEERA:

DEARBORN, Mich. (Reuters) – Iraqi-Americans celebrating Baghdad’s fall to U.S. troops on Wednesday protested the presence of reporters from al-Jazeera, accusing the Arab news channel of siding with Saddam Hussein’s deposed government.

Spontaneous celebrations in this Detroit suburb, which has one of the largest populations of Iraqi Shi’ite Muslims outside the Middle East, occurred all day, as people danced or paraded in the streets in noisy caravans of cars draped with flowers and Iraqi or American flags.

The festivities turned ugly late on Wednesday when scores of men, among a crowd of about 1,500 demonstrators in a Dearborn park, sighted an al-Jazeera correspondent and his cameraman and began hurling insults at them.

“Down, Down Jazeera,” the men shouted angrily, as police moved to surround correspondent Nezam Mahdawi, who had just flown in from Washington to cover Iraqi-American reaction . . .

“It’s a great message to send for all these hypocrite Arabic networks, especially al-Jazeera and Abu Dhabi,” said Cassy Mahbouba, head of a group affiliated with the opposition Iraqi National Congress and a leader of the anti-Jazeera protest. Abu Dhabi is an Arab-language satellite station that competes with al-Jazeera.

“These networks talk about freedom and democracy but they don’t represent freedom and democracy,” Mahbouba said. “To the last moment they tried to support the dictatorship regime.”

Heh. I hope I’m wrong, and it does get coverage.

THIS WRAPUP OF INTELLIGENCE leading up to the war contains the following nugget:

The intelligence officials offered a tantalizing coda for conspiracy-mongers. They said the “crude forgery” received by U.N. weapons inspectors suggesting the Iraqis were trying to buy uranium from Niger as part of their nuclear program was originally put in intelligence channels by France. The officials wouldn’t speculate on French motives.

What, the French trying to discredit the United Nations weapons inspectors?

Now, why would they want to do that?

IS GROUP-BLOGGING THE FUTURE? Amish Tech Support wonders.

You know, InstaPundit was originally going to be a group blog, but I couldn’t get anyone interested at the time.

THERE’S A NEW TALKING POINTS MEMO FOR THE PEACE MOVEMENT:

Question: Do you feel foolish about predicting a quagmire?

Response: Well, there is still the occupation of Iraq, which will be difficult, not to mention the anger the rest of the world feels toward us. It will inspire countless acts of terrorism against the U.S.

Question: Do the cheering Iraqis make you think that what America did was a good thing?

Response: They won’t be cheering for long once they experience globalization. When U.S. multinational corporations move in to exploit them, when they realize that the U.S. will steal their oil, they will understand what this so-called “war of liberation” was really about.

(Whenever possible use an oil reference. Also bring in the globalization angle often. This will animate our rank-and-file (all 16%) and help us raise travel funds for the next WTO meeting. For example, see next question/response.)

Question: What about the children released from the Iraqi prison?

Response: A pure tragedy. Soon-to-be Nike sweatshop workers.

This is a parody, but — as seems so often the case here — reality has outstripped fiction already, as this email from Minneapolis reader Dan Israel demonstrates:

I heard these comments from anti-war protesters (yes, still protesting) on the TV and radio here in Minneapolis yesterday…I’m not making these up:

“This isn’t liberation. The reason the people in Baghdad are cheering the US troops is because they’re starving…of course they are cheering them, they’re hoping the troops will give them some food.”

“I think it’s disgusting when you see these images of our troops giving the Iraqi children candy. They need something nutritious, not just junk food from our troops.”

Honestly, I couldn’t make these up if I tried…

No, I’m sure you couldn’t.

BRAD DELONG WRITES:

Surely those who trusted Mr. Fisk, and who relied on his reporting to support their dismissal of the reports from CentCom in Qatar and of the embedded reporters with the 3rd Infantry Division deserve better than this. I mean, “Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia” is a catchy slogan, but is unsatisfactory as a matter of analysis. Surely Mr. Fisk’s loyal readers deserve an explanation of why it is that the world we live in is much closer to the world as reported by CentCom than the world as reported yesterday and before by Mr. Fisk…

Heh.

NELSON ASCHER explains Saddam’s secularism:

Saddam has been sometimes praised, mainly by the Old Europeans, obviously, for one virtue that at first seems to be beyond discussion, namely, his secularism in a region full of religious fanatics.

But I have finally discovered the ROOT CAUSE of Saddam’s secularism. Islam, like Judaism, has a taboo against the depiction of anything, human images included. By now you may be getting my point. How can one reconcile this puritanical taboo with the narcisism of a guy who wanted his own image, in pictures, statues etc., to be constantly shown everywhere in his country? No way.

Thus between pictures of Saddam, statues of Saddam, Saddam and more Saddam everywhere on one side, and Islam on the other, it was Islam that had to go. As simple as that.

Sounds compelling to me.

I GUESS THIS GUY must be one of those “neocons” that I keep hearing about:

“No, no, no,” yelled Shaaban Mohamad, watching television at a Cairo bookstore. “If the U.S. really wanted democracy, they would have taken out just about every Arab leader we have.”

Funny, he doesn’t look neoconish.

PHILIPPE DE CROY has reverse-engineered NPR’s playbook for war coverage. The results are revealing, and apply well beyond NPR.

HERE’S ONE OF THE MORE STAR-CROSSED AD CAMPAIGNS in recent times.

HERE’S AN EXCELLENT COLUMN BY ROGER PILON on the Texas sodomy case. Excerpt:

In a free society, before government can legitimately restrict the liberty of a citizen, it must have a good reason. The basic presumption, that is, is on the side of individual liberty, not government power. It is the government that must justify its action, not the citizen his liberty. And in that framework, not every rationale for government power will do. In fact, beyond protecting the rights of others, the rationales that will do concern primarily the protection of the general welfare – that is, the good of all.

Plainly, powers that punish those who are doing no harm fail that test immediately. If there is anything that marks the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States, it is the right to pursue happiness, consistent with the rights of others, even when doing so may be unpopular or, in the eyes of many, immoral. That, in a nutshell, is the morality of liberty.

I agree, of course. (Via Keith Terranova).

UPDATE: Yeah, a non-war-related item. I’m hoping to trend steadily in that direction.

LOCAL TV NEWS IN KNOXVILLE showed a spontaneous street demonstration by area Iraqi-Americans, celebrating the fall of Saddam. Here’s a story from the News-Sentinel on a Knoxville man of Iraqi origins who’s very happy, too.

That seems to be the pattern everywhere: For Iraqi Exiles in California, Baghdad’s Fall is Instant Holiday; Local Iraqi-American Thrilled to See Saddam’s Regime Crumble; Iraqi-American Overjoyed by Fall of Regime, etc., etc. Just search “Iraqi-American” on Google News — new stories are appearing steadily.

So where was all the coverage of how unpopular Saddam was with these folks before the war?

UPDATE: Here’s a story about 1,000 Iraqi-Americans celebrating in Dearborn, Michigan. They marched against Saddam before the war, too, but were almost completely ignored by the Big Media.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Jay Caruso has a link to video of the Dearborn celebrations.

INDEED:

This resembled the end of the Cold War because it was, in a different context, exactly the same thing. It’s the end of a vicious, oppressive dictatorship, that had clung on to power, with the help of the Soviet Union and France and China, well past its due date.

I think that Iraq’s “odious debts” should be cancelled.

AS PEOPLE TUT-TUT over the Marine who put the American flag up on Saddam’s statue, Malcolm Hutty observes:

The Iraqi crowd cheered when the US flag was raised. Rageh Omah, BBC reporter on the spot, couldn’t hear the sonorous commentry in the studio, and made the possibly career-limiting mistake of answering the question “How is the crowd reacting to the American flag?” with the simple truth. This answer has obviously not been repeated in evening bulletins.

Yes, I was thinking about that last night. I was also thinking that if it inspires feelings of impotence and fear in audiences around the world, that may be a good thing. We were told back in 1991 that a reason not to invade Baghdad was the potential Arab unhappiness at seeing “American tanks in the streets of an Arab capital.”

Given how things went in the intervening decade-plus in which American tanks were not seen in the streets of an Arab capital, I think it’s safe to call that concern misplaced.

UPDATE: Jeff Jarvis reports:

Cpl. Edward Chin, the man who brought down Saddam yesterday, is on the Today show right now. The flag he put up there was in the Pentagon when it was attacked on 9.11.

That puts a bit of a different spin on it, doesn’t it?

IN RESPONSE TO THE AGONIST’S PLAGIARISM SCANDAL, they’re talking about a blogging code of ethics.

How about: “Don’t lie, cheat or steal, or tolerate those who do.” Er, and this: “Link to the source except in extraordinary cases.”

Er, and as Ken Layne says, “how hard is it to put things in quotes?”

UPDATE: Grashoppa observes: “I sure hope that as a grad student, Sean-Paul realizes that complaining about “time constraints” won’t fly with his thesis committee.”

ANOTHER UPDATE: Meryl Yourish still isn’t satisfied.

BRITISH SAVE FEDAYEEN FROM