SHOCK AND AWE: David Warren writes:

The sight of Iraqis in Baghdad pulling down the statue of Saddam, beating its face with their shoes, and kissing photographs of President Bush thus arrived like a missile into what Fouad Ajami has so discerningly called, “the dream palace of the Arabs” — the collective fantasy into which powerful media such as Al-Jazeera had been playing. It was no mere surprise; it was a profound shock to the entire nervous system of the Arab world. It was the first shock on anything like this scale since June 1967, when another generation of Arabs woke to the discovery that tiny Israel had destroyed the massed armies of all the most powerful Arab states, in just six days. But that did not happen with the immediacy of live television.

And it is precisely the same story everywhere, the same audience reactions when the joy of the liberated Baghdadis was presented on screen, and almost without commentary. Wherever this spectacle appeared, there was weeping, anger, then flicking off the TV. But the anger previously concentrated by the Arab world ‘s media and leaders upon the United States, Britain, and Israel, was suddenly deflected upon the same media and leaders; or else meaninglessly against the euphoric crowds in Baghdad. Those who swore were suddenly swearing not at CNN but at Al-Jazeera, not at George W. Bush, but at Saddam, and Saudi sheikhs, and Hosni Mubarak. Suddenly, all at once, this terrible recognition that they had been lied to — lied to by everyone; lied to on an extraordinary, systematic scale; told the biggest Lie that had ever been told.

But it’s not just the Arabs:

Take, for comparison, the situation in Russia, and put yourself in the position of Russian TV viewers, taking in the same scene from Baghdad.

They know what their army does to Grozny, in Chechnya, and how little thanks they get for it. The Russian military brass had moreover been telling pan-Slavic TV audiences that the Americans only do “non-contact” wars, that they are sissies who rely on technology and get locals to do the icky ground fighting for them, as in Afghanistan. I’ve seen the same message repeated endlessly in Russian media websites. Imagine the shock, for people accustomed to this view, of now seeing plainly the U.S. on the ground, in Baghdad, taking fire, with very low casualties — and in charge, after barely three weeks of war.

The obvious questions present themselves to the more independent Russian mind: “How come Brits and Yanks can pull this off, and all Putin’s soldiers can do is spread carnage? How come Putin’s special-op elites kill more civilians re-taking one lousy concert hall than the Yanks do taking Baghdad? Are we really so well served by that old KGB officer?”

Yep. The ramifications of this will be interesting and, I think, largely positive. Steven Den Beste thinks so too. Er, and was Aziz Poonawalla really expecting a terse list of bullet-points from SDB, of all people?

UPDATE: Note: the Den Beste link above went to the wrong post. Fixed now.

THE IRANIAN MULLAHS ARE NERVOUS, and are trying to stir up trouble in Iraq. Meanwhile they’re facing trouble at home. Heh.

“PAID TO BE A TRAITOR:” The Sun is all over the Galloway story. And Galloway’s own version is now shifting from “this is a lie” to “there may have been some wrongdoing by my staff.”

It’s looking bad for Galloway. Tim Blair has a roundup.

I CAN STILL GET THERE, but people are emailing that when they try to reach Lileks’ site they get sent here:

https://secure.registerapi.com/order/renew/auto.php?domain=LILEKS.C
OM/bleats/

I tried to email Lileks and the email bounced, marked:

all relevant MX records point to non-existent hosts:
it appears that the DNS operator for this domain has installed an invalid MX record with an IP address instead of a domain name on the right hand side

So, James, if you’re reading this you now know what I couldn’t tell you by email.

ANOTHER PERK FOR INSTAPUNDIT READERS! Thanks to my superior clout, the Foresight Institute is offering a last-minute conference discount for InstaPundit readers who are interested in nanotechnology. Or, for that matter, those who aren’t interested in nanotechnology, but think that the Foresight Institute’s annual conference would be a great place to meet dates!

Use this special registration form and you’ll get $100 off the registration fee. I plan to be there, where I’ll be emceeing a bit and participating in some discussions.

[“Another” perk for InstaPundit readers? — Ed. Er, well, besides uh . . . free access to InstaPundit! And, um, free Dr. Frank downloads! Yeah, that’s it! Good enough for me! — Ed. Shouldn’t you be over at Kaus’s? He’s doing car stuff again, and I get carsick easily. — Ed. I might have known.]

I’VE GOT A POST ABOUT RICK SANTORUM’S REMARKS UP OVER AT GLENNREYNOLDS.COM — but what really struck me about his remarks was their near-total incoherence. Yeah, I know, it’s a transcript and most people don’t speak in clean sentences. But still, I read this passage several times:

We have laws in states, like the one at the Supreme Court right now, that has sodomy laws and they were there for a purpose. Because, again, I would argue, they undermine the basic tenets of our society and the family.

Now what in God’s name does this mean? We have laws in states, like the one at the Supreme Court right now — what, the state, or the law? — that has sodomy laws — okay, I guess it’s the state, Texas, he’s talking about, since it’s the one with the sodomy law before the Court — and they were there for a purpose — the states? the laws? I guess he means the laws — Because, again, I would argue, they undermine the basic tenets of our society and the family. — Who? The states undermine the basic tenets of our society? No, that can’t be what he means, he thinks Texas is right. The laws? No, he likes those. So what does “they” mean here? Gays? People who commit sodomy? I guess — but they’re not even in the passage.

Am I jumping too hard on this bit of incoherence? Probably. When you read the whole passage, it’s possible to figure out, more or less, where he’s going with this. But I watch politicians on C-SPAN and I’m astounded by how bad most of them are at extemporaneous speaking. You’d think that would be part of their job, but it’s obvious that the system doesn’t select for that sort of skill. I guess that means it’s not important to the job, but I just finished watching a bunch of my law students present papers, and a bunch more do video interviews for our website, and all of them were better than this.

UPDATE: Reader Martin J. Burke emails:

It is painful to listen to him, and to many other office holders, mangle the language. Among the undergraduates that I teach at CUNY, a sizeable minority are immigrants or children of immigrants. I insist that they read, write and speak college-level English. Might we not hold members of the House and Senate to such standards? While the Constitution prohibits religious tests, I don’t see any prohibition for fluency tests.

Those used to be imposed by the voters. I don’t mean to make a big deal out of this, and I don’t really think that politicians should be required to speak college-level English. And everybody stumbles from time to time, and it’s especially hard for politicians, who have to watch every word for PC-ness of various varieties. But this just really caught my attention. Heck, if you quoted those two sentences out of context it would sound like he was saying that sodomy laws undermine the family — and that’s what they’re meant to do!

MATT WELCH HAS A GREAT ESSAY ON VACLAV HAVEL in Reason.

LAST WEEK I WROTE ON DOUBLE STANDARDS in the treatment of Baghdad’s looting incidents. (That was before I knew that journalists were among the looters, or it would have been triple standards!) But now Andrea Harris identifies more doublethink:

I am intrigued by the idea that the column’s author, one Philip Hensher, apparently thinks that 1) it is possible to fight a “caring” war (how? Drop sympathy cards and flowers along with bombs?) and 2) that the best way to show “caring” would have been to shoot more civilians. The ways in which the minds of anti-Americans work never cease to cause amazement.

Yeah. And that’s why it’s been hard for me to take the looting complaints all that seriously, even before it started to seem likely that at least some of the media types doing the complaining were also pocketing Saddam’s silverware. As I wrote in my earlier piece, if it can be shown that the United States was in a position to stop the looting, and deliberately or callously let it happen, then that should be a big embarrassment and those responsible should be punished.

But, really, the complaints just seem so much like desperate efforts to find something to complain about that it’s hard to take them seriously, even though perhaps we should. (Jay Manifold calls this the bitter fruit of incompetent criticism, noting that the antiwar folks blew their credibility earlier, and now people aren’t listening even to valid complaints.)

A reader wrote me to say that it was worth risking American (and Iraqi) lives to protect the National Museum, even if it meant diverting resources from elsewhere. Well, maybe to some people, but not to me. Mickey Kaus says that the United States should be held to a “strict liability” standard here, with us responsible for anything that happens regardless of whether we actually did anything wrong.

I’d disagree with that. I think a lot of these criticisms underestimate the “fog of war” and the (rather high) likelihood that the Museum was looted before American troops even arrived. To make out a case that goes beyond carping, you have to show (1) that the Museum was un-looted before Baghdad fell; (2) that it would have been comparatively safe and practical for the United States to prevent looting; and (3) that the United States knew all of this, but just refused to act.

There is some evidence that Jay Garner sent a memo on this before Baghdad fell, but that doesn’t really answer the question. I’d have to call the case for negligence here “not proven.” Or as Roger Simon puts it: “It was only a teeny tiny bit our fault.”

Of course, as a mystery writer, he’s a beneficiary of the looting, which will provide MacGuffins aplenty for future works. . . .

UPDATE: Reader Rajat Datta emails:

I wonder how many of those who blame the coalition troops, and Bush and Rumsfeld in particular, for the looting would have held Clinton responsible for the mass expulsions of Muslims from Kosovo by Milosevic and the Servs when we liberated Kosovo. The Serbs were at fault then, and the looters are at fault now, despite the fact that they obviously took advantage of an oportunity that opened up because of our military operations.

Art historian David Nishimura, meanwhile has posts here, here, here, and here. His latest sum-up:

Points to note: the robbers have been heavily armed, quick to shoot, and not easily deterred; there has been extensive insider involvement; and finally, the most secure vaults have successfully defied all break-in attempts. This emerging picture (along with the report noted here that armed intruders had been firing at US forces from the national museum) poses a further challenge to the assumption that the looting of Baghdad’s museums and libraries could easily have been prevented, and was thus the direct result of American negligence.

Stay tuned.

THE CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR HAS BEEN SIFTING THROUGH SADDAM’S FILES. Unlike The Telegraph, the Monitor hasn’t found evidence of Western corruption. But it has found evidence of Saddam’s Stalinist-style horrors — and more signs of an Al Qaeda link:

Abu Sakkar breaks down in tears at night just thinking about the murder of his fellow Shiites, which he sometimes assisted and sometimes tried – in his own way – to prevent. Rights groups, including Human Rights Watch, estimate that 200,000 to 300,000 Shiites were assassinated in the past two decades by Mr. Hussein’s government, which used a network of militias, secret police, and military security forces to create a pervasive police state in Iraq. . . .

“We were trained to ambush and kill American forces in Baghdad,” he says. “The government wanted unmarried people like myself, and we were chosen by Abbas al-Dulami, the police chief. They told us not to talk about the course with anyone. When the war started, we were taken to the camps with these Arab fighters, but they had been told not to talk to us. Some of them were being trained for operations outside Iraq.”

The young officer, curious as to whom he had been sent to work with, asked a more senior Iraqi intelligence officer present at the time, who the strangers were. He was told that they were members of Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda organization, he says, though his report could not be confirmed.

Fascinating.

FORGET SARS: We should really be worried about the Martian Death Flu. Sounds painful.

WIZBANG WONDERS if MSNBC is deliberately shifting rightward. My web-column for them doesn’t get me any special access to corporate strategy, but my guess is that yes, it is. The question is why? You’d think that Fox would have that territory sewed up, making left-angled counterprogramming smarter. But MSNBC tried that and it didn’t work very well.

One possibility: Fox isn’t as far right as people think, at least as compared to the cable-news viewing audience.

WOULD YOU REALLY DIE FOR AN IPOD? I don’t think so.

JOHN SCALZI WEIGHS IN on the Santorum matter.

INVISIBLOG purports to offer anonymous weblog publishing. Can you trust them? I don’t know.

DAWN OLSEN interviewed the InstaWife about her documentary and about kids who kill in general. The results are posted over at BlogCritics. Judging by the length of the phone conversation and the amount of laughter that I overheard, they were talking about other subjects that didn’t make print, too.

(“Didn’t make print?” Shouldn’t that be “Didn’t make pixels?” Whatever.)

HERE’S A LINK TO THE CATO INSTITUTE’S RECOMMENDATIONS ON PROTECTING THE SECOND AMENDMENT via Congressional action. The Cato folks are pretty hard on Ashcroft for not living up to his statements on the meaning of the Second Amendment.

HERE’S AN INTERESTING POST by Trent Telenko on the political fallout from SARS in China.

And scroll down through the comments for a harrowing description of Chinese hospital conditions.

JEFF AT ALPHECCA has his weekly table on bias in gun reportage up, plus much more.

LOOTING UPDATE! LAST WEEK I WROTE:

So how come the ever-so-inquisitive Big Media folks in Baghdad didn’t even mention the possibility that something like this was going on in their [looting] reports? Perhaps CENTCOM should check their luggage as they leave town. . .

Today, we read this:

WASHINGTON — A television news engineer faces smuggling charges after attempting to bring into the United States 12 stolen Iraqi paintings, monetary bonds and other items, federal officials said Wednesday.

Advantage: Oh, hell, you know the routine.

UPDATE: Mark Steyn has more.

And more priceless cultural treasures have just turned up!

ANOTHER UPDATE: Then there’s this:

Of interest to Customs agents was a 5-foot painting that was rolled up in a tube, according to a law enforcement official who spoke on the condition of anonymity. Ornamental kitchen items were also confiscated. Crittenden told the agents he got the painting from a building on the grounds of one of Saddam Hussein’s presidential palaces.

The painting was examined by authenticators, but the value was deemed to be under the $15,000 level that would merit prosecution under Customs laws, according to the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

The souvenirs will not be returned to Crittenden, and eventually will be transferred back to Iraq, officials said.

And here’s my favorite part:

”He didn’t think it was a big deal,” the official said of Crittenden. ”He said all the embedded reporters were doing it.”

Heh. And I wonder how many of them wrote stories denouncing the looting?

(Via Romenesko).

THE TROTTS ARE TAKING MOVABLE TYPE TO THE NEXT LEVEL. I wish ’em well. I upgraded to 2.63 a couple of weeks ago, and it’s even better than before.

SO I TAKE A LIGHT-BLOGGING WEEKEND and Jeff Jarvis makes fun of me. But Dr. Weevil takes off for a week and nobody picks on him.

MATTHEW HOY HAS PRODUCED this list of Cuban dissidents and journalists imprisoned by Castro. Here’s an html version just in case the graphic isn’t displaying for you.

Funny that while Tim Robbins and Michael Moore are claiming that they’re being repressed by the system, you don’t hear many celebrities talking about real repression.

THAT NAS GUN STUDY: I got an email from an insider who says it’s biased, or at least the studiers are.

We’ll see. The proof of the pudding is in the eating, but this one has smelled funny from day one.

SADDAM NEVER REALLY EXISTED, writes Bill Hobbs. After all, we can’t find him or his remains. And the kvetching remnants of the antiwar movement are claiming that the fact that we haven’t found WMDs yet proves that they never existed. So. . . .

More seriously, Hobbs goes on to note:

We know Saddam had the WMDs 12 years ago. Heck, we’ve got video of the stuff. And we know he didn’t destroy his WMDs because neither he nor the UN inspectors ever provided evidence that his WMDs were fully eliminated and his WMD programs fully shut-down. Even Hans Blix says Iraq can’t account for tons of the stuff. So we know it was there, and know it hasn’t been destroyed. The only we don’t know is where, exactly, it is right now.

I predict a new meme: if it was there, and we can’t find it now, it’ll be presented as proof that we should have left it in Saddam’s responsible hands, instead of invading. Hobbs, however, thinks the blame goes the other way.

UPDATE: Hey, I just noticed that Dr. Weevil made this argument first. Great minds think alike — but all I can say is, advantage: Weevil. Which sounds kind of weird when you say it out loud.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Here’s an even earlier instance.

ONE OF MY COLLEAGUES at the University of Tennessee is doing an online survey of bloggers and blog-readers. Follow the link and tell ’em about yourself. It’s confidential.