The Vangua kicks off its front page today with the headline "Chirac to veto war no matter what; French president reiterates firm opposition to Iraq ultimatum; Russia announces veto of second resolution; Washington willing to delay deadline to obtain majority; Minister threatens Blair with resignation; Aznar to support USA at any cost." Andrew made a post on EuroPundits a few days ago suggesting that Tony, his Labour Third Way supporters, and the Tories might make common cause if Old Labour abandons Blair. I honestly don't think that enough Labour MPs will desert Tony to make such a thing necessary, but it's within the realm of possibilities. If it does happen, Tony will have to call it a National Unity government and call elections when the war's over and things have calmed down a bit. Since the most probable outcome is an overwhelming Allied victory and the posterior exposure of all Saddam's crimes in detail, Blair would almost certainly be returned with a huge majority.

Wonder if there will be a Canadian backlash against Chrétien and a German backlash against Schröder after those countries' populaces realize that those leaders tried to obstruct the overthrow of an evil dictator with bloody hands? I'll bet there is. Common human decency will win out over knee-jerk anti-Americanism, though expect the idiotarian left to invent charges of Allied atrocities and, later, of not making Baghdad look like Stockholm fast enough. (The Spanish idiotarians are right now up on their high horses over Kabul's still looking like, well, Kabul, though we haven't bailed out and we're spending half a billion dollars all by ourselves--not counting aid from other countries--to help fix the place up. The most telling statistic is that two million Afghan refugees have already returned home. People vote with their feet.)

I can't help but think that Chirac is carrying his opposition to the war on Saddam to the point of being just plain foolish. At this point, he's gone way too far if his goal is merely to express his moral objections to military action (and he doesn't really have any of those. Chirac is, most likely, a sociopath. He has no conscience and no sense of ethics). He must know that he can't stop an Anglo-American attack on Saddam; all he can do is wreck NATO and the UN. Maybe that's his goal, to dismantle the Western alliance in the hope that other European states will side with France rather than the US. If that's what he wanted to do, he's lost badly, since he's only got Germany and Belgium with him. Maybe he wants to blame America for the breakup of these two institutions; there are enough idiotarians who'll believe anything about America that that charge might stick. Maybe it's just pure spite. I would never put that past any French ruler. And maybe he's really frightened about what's going to come out about French dealings with Iraq and with other sundry dictatorships--but that's going to come out no matter what France does. Saddam is going to be Big Loser #1 in the upcoming war, and France is starting to look a lot like Big Loser #2.

Aznar said he would like to see a second resolution passed in the UN, but he doesn't see it as necessary to turn loose the troops. He accused France, Russia, and China of having economic interests in Iraq. He also said, "Only the United States has demonstrated the capacity to protect the rest of the world from the threat of the dictators." The Chileans have siad that they'd like to see Saddam get one last chance and that they'd like to postpone the March 17 deadline, perhaps to March 28. Vicente Fox said he would consult with "a group of notables" and they would decide Mexico's Security Council vote; Fox emphasized that Mexico's decision would not be unilateral or presidential. What this means is that Fox is going to throw Mexico's vote to the gringos at the last moment and try to dump the political responsibilities onto the shoulders of his "group of notables".

Andy Robinson, idiotarian Vangua correspondent in New York, has an interview with Satan himself, NOAM CHOMSKY, today. Noam says, among other things: "The UK resigned itself after World War II to be Washington's junior partner, despite the degree of humiliation or the barbarities it has to commit"; "Turkey has 50 million Kurds"; "Within the American system of propaganda...(in the September 2002 Congressional elections) the Administration had to prevent questions like Enron, Social Security, or unemployment from being campaign issues"; "The Reagan administration told us...that the Russians were going to bomb us from an airbase on Grenada; "The United States wants to use (its power) to guarantee world domination now and forever."; "The objective is to strike fear into the world, and one way to do it is to attack a defenseless country"; "During 25 years the United States has unilaterally blocked a diplomatic resolution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict in opposition to the rest of the world"; "What kind of massacre is (the war) going to be?" Chomsky talks quite a bit about how the US is going to force Turkey into compliance and, of course, how the media is manipulated by some huge conspiracy.

I just translated a few of the greatest hits; if anybody wants me to, I'll translate the whole thing and post it on EuroPundits. It's really just the same old Chomsky crap, though. By the way, Andy Robinson identifies Chomsky as a professor at Harvard University. (He's really at MIT.) I can't promise that the two ridiculous factual errors Chomsky apparently made--the 50 million Kurds in Turkey and the September 2002 congressional elections--aren't really due to Robinson, who besides being an idiotarian isn't very smart or very professional. Oh, by the way, Robinson identifies Chomsky as a "pacifist". Chomsky, however, calls himself a "libertarian anarchist", which is rather a different kettle of fish, and most normal people would classify Chomsky as an anti-American and anti-Semitic far-left Marxist. (Yes, I know Chomsky is of Jewish origin. I also think he's an anti-Semite.)

The Socialists will not mount a no-confidence vote against Aznar if they only have the support of the Communists; the Catalan Nationalists, CiU, have announced that they will not support such a motion.

Here's a nasty stink in the world of the Catalan universities. A Basque anti-ETA professor named Gotzone Mora, who is a member of a well-known group called ¡Basta Ya! (Enough Already!), was refused permission by Joan Tugures, the rector of the University of Barcelona, to speak at the university. Fernando Savater, a philosopher and writer who is also a member of ¡Basta Ya!, spoke several days ago at the UB, where he was booed off the stage and was physically attacked by radical students. Power within the universities is in the hands of extreme Catalanists and leftists; one of the reasons that Mora was prohibited from speaking is that ¡Basta Ya! is considered to be an anti-Catalanist organization. The organization that invited Mora to speak, Professors for Democracy, is unpopular with the university administration because it has challenged university regulations requiring the use of Catalan. Probably the last big stink was about two years ago when at the Rovira i Virgili university in Tarragona, a professor serving as a proctor for the Selectivitat, the equivalent of the SAT, announced that she had copies of the exam in Spanish for those students who preferred Spanish to Catalan. (The Selectivitat is supposed to be provided in Spanish if the student requests it, but it seems that announcing this is not permitted.) The professor was disciplined and another organization close to Professors for Democracy, Catalan Civic Togetherness, sued the university and won.

Meanwhile, the ETA-front newspaper, Egunkaria, which the government has closed down for being, well, a terrorist front organization, is receiving support from the Communists and both Catalan nationalist parties, the centrist Convergence and Union and the leftist Republican Left. They're saying this is a freedom-of-speech issue. That is rich because the Basque terrorists are against anybody's free speech but their own, and they'll kill you if you speak out too loudly against them. The extreme Catalanists won't kill you; they'll just prohibit you from using any language they don't happen to like and shut out inconvienient ideas from being spoken. Free speech my ass. These people care nothing for free speech. And here they call Noam Chomsky a "dissident", lumping him in with Havel and Sakharov, whose boots Chomsky isn't fit to lick. Chomsky is no dissident. I personally saw him speak at the University of Kansas. The linguistics department, where I was a grad student, invited him to speak on linguistics. He agreed (there was a fee, of course) under the condition that he also be ceded the university auditorium to give his anti-American speech on how the government controls the media and there's no free expression in America. Of course, real dissidents are not paid to express their ideas in public. Other so-called dissidents like Angela Davis and Louis Farrakhan have also spoken at KU. The Black Student Union invited Farrakhan and used everybody's student fees to pay for it. Protests went unheeded. Dissidents, my ass.