Tim Blair

Zayed has a "point" about that "Yahoo" article.

Look for more street demos as Alaa the Messopotamian has said they would occure on the 10th, while Zeyad has said they would be street demos on the 12th.

Maybe their both right.

McGeough has written a pathetic article. After trawling the slums of Baghdad to find a disaffected family - surely not too hard to find anywhere - he gives them the full treatment.

"The only way we are better off is that Saddam has gone," says the old man. Then next sentence, whoops, it seems they can worship their religion freely.

Then a little later, whoops again, 'cause it seems their school has a lick of paint and new windows.

McGeough makes a big deal of the overflowing drains, but who let the infrastructure run down? Writers like Mark Steyn have already noted that Saddam was not much good at delivering civic services. When you tear the tongues out of people who criticise you, I suppose you can afford to be lax about collecting the rubbish.

This item smacks of absolute desperation to find something - anything - negative to say about the US.

But - again quoting Mark Steyn - Anti Americanism is the prism through which everything at the Herald has to be viewed.

Anti-terrorist demonstrations in Baghdad!

And the tenterhooks of quotation marks for “France” (Vichy) & its “press organizations” (Agence France-Presse)!

Now I think I’ll go have me a DEE-licious turkey hero sandwich, mmm-MMM!

For lunch!

he used the word QUAGMIRE in it's correct context! WOW!

It was already evening in Queens, where I dwell. Long live the Borough & County of Queens.

I am hungry again. Now for some Chinese. I mean, Asian.

MEDIA CORRECTLY REPORTS MIDDLE EAST CONFLICT
I have solved the puzzle of the conflicting observations reported by Paul McGeough and Zeyad.
The fact is that Iraqis are conflicted, both within each self and between themselves, about the US presence and the Baathist insurgency. This follows the pattern of conflict-propagation set by citizens of the Mesopotamian region, going as far back as Hammurabai.
We have all experienced inner conflict, mostly over matters of no great consequence eg more beer or more exercise, Blair or Quiggin?
Unfortunately, conflict when AK 47s are freely available is a lot more expensive.
It only takes one spanner in the works to bring a factory to a grinding halt.
As the history of the Middle East shows, if only a few thousand conflicted young men take up arms they can turn a whole nation into a shambles.
That is why the US is turning to the methods employed by the IDF in order to control the insurgency.
A fairly ominous portent, and one that cannot be continued once US main forces leave.
Which implies that they will not leave in any kind of hurry, or if they do, the Shiite majority will have to resort to Hussein's tactics to quell that Suuni minority.
How the worm turns.

Andrew Sullivan, Are We Winning In Iraq? Dec. 1, 2003

...The best analysis, as usual, came from John F Burns in yesterday's NYT. He uses a simple conversation to unpeel the layers of deception, self-interest, self-deception and fear that now envelop Iraqi society. It seems to me obvious that in this war, unlike the war against al Qaeda, capturing or killing the central figure, Saddam, is the sine qua non of continuing progress.

NOTE: John F. Burns’ NY Times article is now in fee-charging archive, so I changed Sullivan’s link in the above excerpt to the same article free at the International Herald Tribune.

Excerpt from Burns’ article:

Alawi: "By the grace of Allah, peace be upon him, Saddam will kick the Americans out."

The men were asked if reports of Saddam's brutality, and of mass graves, were American fictions. They spoke softly to each other, then resumed.

Jasim: "Well, O.K., we didn't love Saddam; we have to be honest about it. He was a man of war, and only war: Because of him, I served 12 years in the army, I fought in Iran and Kuwait, I saw many of my fellow Iraqis killed, and what did we get? Nothing! It was a big mistake to attack Iran, and then to invade Kuwait, and it is as a result of that that men like me have seen their lives waste away."

Agh, forgot that, here, italics don’t automatically stay activated till you turn them off. Instead you have to add italics tags to each paragraph that you want italicized. All three of the paragraphs after “Excerpt from Burns’ article:” form a single excerpt.

"up to 1,000 Iraqis" -

whoa, now that's impressive. Pity that number is dwarfed by just about every other protest in Iraq ever.

And pardon my cynicism, but how spontaneous was this march anyway? Given the rent-a-crowd that turned up for the first statue pull-down, this is not a facetious question.

"rent-a-crowd" -- yawn. You have just made yourself irrelevant.

Pity that number is dwarfed by just about every other protest in Iraq ever.

The real pity is that just about every other protest in Iraq in the last 30 years was forced on the participants at gunpoint by Saddam's troops.