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Best of the Web Today - April 9, 2003
By JAMES TARANTO

Today in History
" 'It would be useless and therefore cruel,' Robert E. Lee remarked on the morning of April 9, 1865, 'to provoke the further effusion of blood, and I have arranged to meet with General Grant with a view to surrender.' "--from the Library of Congress Web site

The New York Times reports that Iraq's "information minister" has been "whistling Dixie."

Reuterville Falls
"Hundreds of jubilant Iraqis mobbed a convoy of U.S. Marines on Wednesday, cheering, dancing and waving as American troops swept toward central Baghdad through slums and leafy suburbs from the east." A Dick Cheney daydream? No, the lead sentence of a dispatch, entitled "Smiles and Flowers for U.S. Marines in Baghdad," from--you're never going to believe this--Reuters.

That's right, folks, it appears Reuterville has been liberated! Perhaps the wire service's odious anti-American bias was merely the product of fear. As CNN notes in its report from Baghdad, Iraq's "information minister" seems to have disappeared, and "the government minders, who have shadowed international reporters for the last 12 years, were not at the Palestine Hotel, which is the base for many journalists," this morning. Or maybe having Reuters' Baghdad headquarters shelled by Saddam's forces--an attack that killed a Reuters cameraman as well as one from a Spanish TV network--shocked them back to reality.

'Saddam' Falls
It's not clear if Saddam Hussein is dead, injured, cowering beneath Baghdad or on the lam in Tikrit, but this morning brought TV viewers a real treat: the toppling of a statue of Saddam in (in case you missed it, MSNBC has video online). As Iraqis realized the regime was no more, they crowded around the enormous statue, trying in vain to break it. Fortunately, the U.S. Marines were on hand. The Associated Press describes the scene:

In a main square of the capital, a crowd of Iraqis and U.S. Marines pulled down a 40-foot statue of Saddam, breaking it in half on the way down. Hundreds of people swarmed over the hollow metal torso, tearing it to pieces and dragging the head down the street. Before bringing it down, the Marines briefly covered the statue's face with an American flag, then replaced it with the red-black-and-white Iraqi flag.

"I'm 49, but I never lived a single day. Only now will I start living," said Yussuf Abed Kazim, a mosque preacher, as he bashed the statue's pedestal with a sledgehammer, knocking off tile and concrete. "That Saddam Hussein is a murderer and a criminal."

It's a common scene throughout free Iraq. "Every time we tear down a picture of Saddam, they cheer," Capt. Peter McAleer of the 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit, tells an AP reporter in Nasariyah. British military spokesman Col. Chris Vernon explains that the attacks on Saddam's likeness are part of the military strategy: "Any picture or effigy of Saddam Hussein we have viewed as a legitimate target in order to achieve a psychological effect, basically to encourage the local people that this figure of their oppression is no longer the great strength he was."

Scenes From the Liberation
The New York Times describes a scene from west of Amara, near the Iranian border:

The little town of Kumayt gave the Marines a warm welcome, crowding around individual men, tugging on sleeves, tapping shoulders, shouting in Arabic. "They think I'm Santa Claus," said Maj. Daniel Geisenhof, surrounded by a couple of dozen men and boys offering him sunflower seeds.

"U.S. soldiers help the Iraqi people," one man said in English. "Iraq people support Mr. Bush because Mr. Bush loves the Iraqi people."

Word of the bombing in Baghdad on Monday that had Saddam Hussein and his two sons as targets had already spread to the town.

"Saddam dead and two sons," the man said, though it seemed impossible that he could be sure. "Let's become people happy for the news."

The Norfolk Virginian-Pilot reports from inside Amara, where the Marines were expecting a tank battle with an Iraqi armored division. But the plans went--well, whatever the opposite of "awry" is:

When the convoy approached this alleged enemy stronghold, the company was hit, all right--by an army of jubilant children that mobbed the Marines like they were rock stars.

"Mis-tah! Mis-tah! Bush good!" they shouted at the stunned Marines.

Charlie Company spent the next four hours wading through swarms of children asking for candy and men offering cigarettes--hardly what the Marines had prepared themselves for in the hours leading up to the assignment.

"This place is a zoo," company commander Greg Grunwald said as he tried to make his way through the crowd after they realized he was the leader.

After a little research, Grunwald discovered what had happened.

"There is no enemy," Grunwald said. "The general got shot yesterday and they quit."

Salon is up north, in the Kurdish city of Mahad, liberated from the regime on Sunday:

The men of the town saw us walking and led us, nearly carried us, through the crowd toward the Baath Party headquarters in the center of town. It is a building built of the same yellow stone of the temple on the hill, but in the style of an old crusader castle with round turrets. It was built without exterior windows. On the outside of the building are the words, "Saddam, our Jerusalem." The words were smeared with mud. The inside was packed with people.

The building has a courtyard and a second-story balcony that goes around it; the men of the town led us to the balcony where the crowd assembled below us. Hundreds more people were milling outside the castle chanting and shouting. They were saying "Bar-zan-i" and singing a song that was more like a chant. They chanted the name of the Kurdistan Democracy Party leader, Massoud Barzani, and when they caught sight of us, the chant and the clapping changed and they shouted, "Am-ri-ka! Am-ri-ka! Am-ri-ka! Am-ri-ka! Am-ri-ka! Am-ri-ka! Am-ri-ka! Am-ri-ka! Am-ri-ka!"

Here's the London Telegraph, back in Baghdad:

One man, in his late 50s, tore down a picture of Saddam wearing his trademark military beret and sunglasses.

In a mark of the dramatic changes that were sweeping the city, he took off his shoe and used it to beat the image of the dictator's face--an act considered to be a great insult in the Arab world.

"This is the criminal, this is the infidel," he said. "This is the destiny of every traitor. . . . He killed millions of us. Oh people, this is freedom."

Ananova.com has some grainy photos of the scene. The sentiment, meanwhile, finds echoes among Baghdad's Shiite community, CNN reports:

A Shiite Muslim leader told a crowd of about 400 people in Saddam City: "The tyrant of the world is finished, thanks to the coalition. Thank God for Iraq, the victorious.

"God is great. Thank God who helped us finish the tyranny," he added.

Reuters describes a scene that sounds a bit like a riot (or maybe an "antiwar" protest):

Looters gutted official buildings, hauling off anything from air conditioners to flowers. The finance ministry was ablaze late in the day, though it was unclear how the fire had started. . . .

Cheering crowds earlier sacked U.N. headquarters in the Canal Hotel and drive off in U.N. cars. The building had housed U.N. aid workers as well as arms inspectors, who were withdrawn shortly before the war began on March 20.

The satirical site ScrappleFace.com puts the looting into perspective:

The looting in Baghdad stopped suddenly today as Iraq's largest organized crime family disappeared from the city.

Thousands of Baghdad residents entered government buildings in an attempt to retrieve some small portion of what had been stolen from them for the past 24 years.

"I got a big vase from one of Uday's offices," said one local woman. "It can never replace the family members Saddam took from me, but all of this stuff belongs to the people and it was taken from us without our permission."

This vignette from the San Francisco Chronicle is priceless:

"Yes, things are changing," said Osama Yessin, a fruit vendor in the Kerradeh neighborhood in the eastern part of the city. "A lot of people may be leaving," he said, waving his hand upward in a typical Iraqi gesture referring to Hussein's elite. "This is good. The Americans are welcome."

But then something seemed to click inside Yessin, triggering old survival instincts and old habits. "But we will fight the Americans, and they will all die," he said, stroking his ample stomach.

And blogger Donald Sensing snapped a photo from Fox News Channel of a pair of Iraqis holding a banner reading "Go Home Human Shields. You U.S. Wankers."

Not Everyone's Happy
And this just in: The New York Times' R.W. "Johnny Quagmire" Apple reports that this is not Vietnam:

The antiwar forces, who have had to contend from the start with the widespread belief that their position is unpatriotic and unsupportive of American troops engaged in deadly combat, must now bear the additional burden of arguing with success. American losses are relatively small: 96 dead to date, compared with 200 a day at the height of the Vietnam War.

His colleague, Thomas Friedman, isn't so sure. In the southern city of Umm Qasr, he finds "a scene of humiliation, not liberation." He says America must rebuild Iraq--which of course it will--because "America broke Iraq." America broke Iraq? Didn't the Baath Party have a little something to do with the country's current misery?

Ex-newsman Walter Cronkite, speaking at North Carolina's Elon University last night, called President Bush "grossly arrogant" for deciding to liberate Iraq under the authority of only 17, rather than 18, U.N. resolutions, the AP reports. The Boston Globe's Derrick Jackson is mad at President Bush for praying for the troops: "All that many Iraqis have felt from the God-blessed troops of the United States is preventive vengeance." Anti-American polemicist Robert "25 Rolls" Disk, meanwhile, accuses Iraqis of being ignorant while shamelessly displaying his own cluelessness:

On my way back past the Ahrar Bridge, I found a crowd of spectators standing on the parapet, watching the American tanks with a mixture of amusement and fear. Did they not know what was happening in their city, or--an idea that has possessed me in recent days--are the poor of Baghdad kept in such ignorance of events that they simply do not realise that the Americans are about to occupy their city? Could it be that the cigarette sellers and the bakery queues and the bus drivers just don't know what lies down on the banks of the Tigris?

Well, they know now, and they seem overjoyed--in contrast to a Los Angeles Times report, which claims " a sense of defeat is felt on the shuttered, shattered streets of Baghdad." Well, maybe not in Baghdad, but here's an e-mail we got from the idiots at Not in Our Name:

As we react to the events now taking place in the Iraq, it is important to recognize and respect what many are experiencing, be it anger at the carnage and our inability to stop it, grief for the innocent lives lost, despair over the loss of American ideals and the erosion of freedoms for all, or fear of what lies ahead.

This landed in our inbox 20 minutes after the Saddam statue fell--not in their name!

No one seems gloomier, though, than our old chum John Bradley, managing editor of the Arab News:

Yes, there will be more terrorism, and Osama Bin Laden--or at least his infamous voice--was heard once more yesterday, calling for suicide attacks and thus giving more easy justification, as he did on Sept. 11, to America's imperial ambition. Thanks, Osama, you've done us all about as much good as George W. Bush. Both are two sides of the same coin. . . .

As in the 1990s, when those on the Left suddenly found themselves disenfranchised after the Berlin Wall came down and Stalinism was replaced in Eastern Europe with that cruder system of exploitation, undiluted capitalism, so now those on the side of basic justice and human rights know that the international, independent judges have been bought off, and there is no longer any recourse to moral argument.

"Those on the side of basic justice and human rights" is an odd way of describing people who mourn the liberation of an enslaved people, whether in Berlin or in Baghdad.

So Where's the Apology?
On March 6, Fox News Channel aired a Bill O'Reilly interview with Janeane Garafalo:

O'Reilly: If you are wrong . . . and if the United States--and they will, this is going to happen--goes in, liberates Iraq [with] people in the street, American flags, hugging our soldiers . . . you gonna apologize to George W. Bush?

Garafalo: I would be so willing to say, "I'm sorry." I hope to God that I can be made a buffoon of, that people will say, "You were wrong. You were a fatalist." And I will go to the White House on my knees on cut glass and say, "Hey, you and Thomas Friedman [sic] were right. . . . I shouldn't have doubted you" . . .

O'Reilly: Nobody will call you a buffoon because I will protect you.

Garafalo: Thank you, sir.

Megawati's Wager
Indonesia's President Megawati Sukarnoputri was hoping lots more Iraqis would be killed in the war, it would seem. From a Saudi Press Agency report, which appears on the site of the Israeli organization IMRA:

She also said that when the war started, she had placed a bet with the head of Indonesia's intelligence agency that the campaign would last several weeks. "I predicted it would be a long one. I have nearly won," she told the audience, which included Defense Minister Matori Abdul Jalil. "It has already been three weeks."

What Would We Do Without Experts?
"Expert: Only Saddam's Death Would Free Iraq"--headline, Jerusalem Post, April 9

Iraqis vs. Palestinians?
America's Arab and Muslim mau-mauers are raising a stink because, as the Associated Press reports, "the retired Army general who will oversee the rebuilding of Iraq signed a statement that accused Palestinians of filling their children with hate and that praised Israel." In other words, they're upset that he told the truth:

Arab and Muslim leaders say retired Lt. Gen. Jay Garner's involvement with the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs--including the document he signed and a trip he took to Israel--raises questions about whether he is the right person to oversee Iraq's reconstruction.

"I honestly think when Iraqis find out (about the statement) they are going to be genuinely appalled," said Hussein Ibish, a spokesman for the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. . . .

"There have been well over 2,000 Palestinians killed in the past 2 1/2 years and the Iraqis know who killed them," said University of Chicago Professor Rashid Khalidi, who specializes in Middle Eastern history.

The Jerusalem Post reports that "there are almost daily demonstrations in the West Bank and Gaza Strip protesting the war in Iraq." The paper quotes Saed Atef, head of the Palestinian journalists association: "Our message to the United States and Britain is that we don't believe your claim that you are coming to Iraq to liberate it and bring democracy."

Given the Palestinians' open sympathy for the Iraqis' oppressor, we'd be surprised if the Iraqis have any sympathy at all for the Palestinians.

Our Friends the Canadians
"The Canadian in command of a multinational naval task force in the Persian Gulf said yesterday that the [Canadian] federal government has ordered him not to hand over any Iraqis he captures to the United States, including even Saddam Hussein and his two sons," the National Post reports.

Meanwhile, the Associated Press reports that erstwhile starlet Jane Fonda was in Vancouver, British Columbia, yesterday, where she lamented the liberation of Iraq: "What it's going to mean for [America's] stability as a nation, for terrorism, for the economy--I can't imagine. I think the entire world is going to be united against us."

Ooh, now we're worried!

What Was That About a Distraction Again?
"The fourth of six Yemeni-American men accused of attending an al Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan pleaded guilty Tuesday to terrorism-related charges," CNN reports from Buffalo. Thirty-year-old Sahim Alwan admits "that he attended al Qaeda's now-destroyed al Farooq camp near Kandahar, Afghanistan, in the summer of 2001, just a few months before the Islamic terrorist group carried out the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks against the United States." Unlike the other three convicted and two alleged members of the upstate New York cell, Alwan had two private meetings with Osama bin Laden.

The Patriot--II
We erred, sort of, in asserting yesterday that Josh Marshall and former Enron adviser Paul Krugman had raised the issue of Sen. John Kerry's patriotism. In fact, the man who first made an issue of Kerry's patriotism was . . . John Kerry. Alert readers noticed that last Friday the Associated Press quoted the senator as saying: "The Republicans have tried to make a practice of attacking anybody who speaks out strongly by questioning their patriotism. I refuse to have my patriotism or right to speak out questioned. I fought for and earned the right to express my views in this country." Subsequently, Marshall gave Kerry a you-go-girl late that night, and Krugman waddled in yesterday with a high-five.

It turns out Kerry has been singing this tune for a while. The Oct. 23, 2002, Kansas City Star (no longer available online) quotes Kerry as saying: "So let me just give it to you straight: Jim Talent's attacks on Jean Carnahan's patriotism don't belong in this campaign." Carnahan was a Democratic senator from Missouri. Talent, her challenger, had criticized her for opposing President Bush's homeland-security plan. Talent, who did not actually say anything about Carnahan's patriotism, is now a Republican senator from Missouri. There's another word for a Democrat who accuses a Republican of attacking his patriotism: loser.

Why is this? Well, for one thing, "Don't attack my patriotism" is not actually an expression of patriotism. Patriotism isn't about you, it's about the country. Proclaiming oneself patriotic is like saying, "I'm a very religious man." Well, maybe you are, but doesn't God figure into the equation somehow?

Also, though this is rude to say, there actually are people who are unpatriotic--that is, openly hostile, and not merely indifferent, toward their country and its symbols. Three quick examples:

Jennie Traschen, the Amherst University physicist who on Sept. 10, 2001 (oops!), declared: "The [American] flag is a symbol of tyranny and fear and destruction and terrorism."


Katha Pollitt, the columnist for The Nation who just two weeks after Sept. 11 publicly boasted that she had forbidden her daughter to fly an American flag, for "the flag stands for jingoism and vengeance and war."


Julianne Malveaux, sometime USA Today columnist, who on June 30, 2002, told CNN's Wolf Blitzer: "I don't celebrate the Fourth of July. I get up in the morning and read Frederick Douglas' 'The Meaning of the Fourth of July to the Negro' and then I grouse for the rest of the day.
One of the glories of America is that even people who hold such extreme and wrongheaded views have the freedom to express them and to participate in the political process. It seems unlikely, though, that any of these ladies, or anyone who thinks like them, vote in Republican primaries. And this could be a problem for Kerry: Will his professions of patriotism cost him the votes of his party's anti-American fringe?


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You Don't Say--I
"Lower Oil Prices Mean Cheaper Gas"--headline, Springfield (Mo.) News-Leader, April 9

You Don't Say--II
"In 65 years of surveys, there has been no instance when people said their taxes were too low."--"New AEI Study on Public Opinion on Taxes," press release, American Enterprise Institute, April 8

You Don't Say--III
"Long TV Sitting Raises Obesity Risk, Study Finds"--headline, Reuters, April 8

Let Our People Go
The New York Times editorial board thinks there are too many people in prison:

When violent crime rates were higher, many politicians were afraid to be seen as soft on crime. But now that crime has receded and the public is more worried about taxes and budget deficits, it would not require extraordinary courage for elected officials to do the right thing and scale back our overuse of jails and prison cells.

And if they take the Times' advice, watch for violent crime rates to become higher once again. Meanwhile, the BBC reports that the French prison population is also at an all-time high.

Said Sade, Meant Masoch
Turns out we made a mistake in yesterday's item on peace wackos in Oakland, Calif. We suggested that the group called Queers for Palestine ought to be called Sadists for Palestine, given how Palestinian Arabs treat homosexuals. More than a dozen readers wrote to say we should have said Masochists for Palestine. We checked the dictionary, and sure enough sadism means "delight in cruelty," while masochism means "pleasure in being abused or dominated."

Wow, who knew? Well, actually, quite a few of you did. Why do we find that a bit unsettling?