Well, the Vanguardia is offering a whole pile of news today. The headline is "Blair and Aznar certain ultimatum to pass; Bush sends Powell, Rice to Russia, Mexico, Chile to gain support; De Villepin launches lightning tour to gain African 'noes'." Looks like the Chileans might be fairly easy to convince, but the Mexicans won't, because the Mexican government cannot appear to its highly nationalistic citizens to be following gringo orders. It's interesting that the Chilean people and media seem to be a good bit less anti-American than their Spanish equivalents, particularly so since the 1973 coup in Chile is one of the great crimes of the United States according to Spanish America-haters. (The others are, in order, the American military alliance with Spain under Franco's regime, the Spanish-American war, and the embargo on Cuba. You might hear references to Hiroshima and Vietnam. Spaniards normally fail to dig into the two great sins of the American past, though, slavery and the treatment of the Indians. This is possibly because their empire was considerably more brutal than the British and, later, the Americans, regarding these questions.)

The Vangua is floating the rumor that if the Alliance can pull nine votes in the Security Council for a second UN resolution (1411 being the "first"), France won't dare to veto if Russia doesn't. If Russia abstains, expect a price to be paid. That price might be silence while the tanks roll into Chechenia approximately two hours after the full-scale war starts sometime late this month. See, here I am predicting war again after being wrong the last eight times I did so.

Madrid is showing every sign of standing by Washington and London in the current diplomatic crisis, despite the antiwar feelings of much of the citizenry and the demonstrations of 2-15. Aznar said to Der Speigel, "In 1938 hundreds of thousands of people acclaimed Chamberlain in London and Daladier in Paris because they didn't declare war on Hitler." Mr. Aznar may be guilty of simplisme here, but is anybody denying the truth of his words? The guy is under tremendous fire from the Socialists, yet he keeps cool and collected. I am convinced that he is not for turning.

Carlos Nadal in the Vangua, who is usually very reasonable though quite boring, says that the French and Germans are being hypocrites when they call for more inspections because Saddam would never have even let them in again if it weren't for the tremendous Anglo-American buildup; the Americans have 250,000 men in the area and the British 45,000 more. Britain will not be a mere sidekick in the upcoming war.

"Intransigent" seems to be the official word used by the opposition to describe Mr. Aznar's and his People's Party's position on the war; the Catalan Nationalists, CiU, want to "listen to the inspectors" and criticize Aznar's government for being "rigid" and, you guessed it, intransigent. They want many more months of inspections, but haven't mentioned kicking in and paying for the Alliance forces in the region that are the only thing preventing Saddam from throwing all those inspectors out on their keesters tomorrow at dawn. The Socialist leader, Zapatero, wants to "serve peace and a more just international order." Wait a minute--not only is he anti-American on the war, he also wants us to give away all our money to, like, Zambia! Zapatero is a dope. No serious politician can talk so ingenuously. He sounds like a ninth-grader who just got hold of a copy of the Manifesto. Llamazares, the head of the Spanish CP, called Aznar's position "shameful" and announced he would call for a vote of no confidence. Well, they already had one of those last Tuesday. Aznar won with a vote of 184-163 in a secret ballot--all of his deputies and one of the opposition voted in his favor. The joke going around is that the extra "no" vote was ex-Prime Minister Felipe González's, since Felipe showed up for the first time in six months for this vote.

Jordi Barbeta from the Vangua called the speech Zapatero gave in Parliament on the occasion of the no-confidence vote "more appropriate for an old-time university assembly than a Parliamentary session." Enric Juliana has a bug up his butt about the American Enterprise Institute, which he considers to be some secret plot fomenting, like, pro-Americanism. Baltasar Porcel calls Bush "obsessed" and says that the Republicans, not the Democrats start wars; however, Wilson got us into WWI, Roosevelt into WWII, Truman into Korea, and Kennedy and Johnson into Vietnam. All Democrats.