Boy, the Vanguardia is in a nasty mood today. Heh, heh, heh. As everyone's been saying, this is pure Schadenfreude.

Guess which reporter got the front-page article? Baghdad Bob Fisk! Here's a summary of Baghdad Bob's dispatch: "The Americans "liberated" Baghdad yesterday...sacking, pillage, anarchy...bloody hospital operating rooms...men who had servilely obeyed the most minor secret policeman have become gigantic figures, shouting with hate against the dictator...the "liberators" are a new, foreign, and all-powerful force of occupation lacking in the culture, language, race, and religion necessary to contribute to the unity of Iraq...an epic of the same large-scale orgy of robbery and destruction that the British managed to successfully prevent in Basra...(The Americans), when (Saddam) was in their hands, did what they could--in the decades of the seventies and the eighties--to arm him, help him economically, and offer him political support, making him the authentic dictator that he in fact became....(History says) in these cases, the prisons pass into the hands of the new authorities, like the torture chambers and the methods of easily making weapons of mass destruction...(The Iraqis tell me) "we will want to get rid of the Americans, they want our oil. There will be resistance and then they will call us terrorists."...At bottom I admire their ingenuousness, despite the devastating realities that await the United States in this dangerous and barbarous land...(They killed) two Western journalists and then lied about it...Baghdad lay last night at the feet of its new master...new "friends" of the United States will appear who will inagurate a new relationship with the world, new fortunes will be made which will benefit the "liberators" of the Iraqies and--also undoubtedly--new relations with Israel will be developed with the opening of an Israeli Embassy in Baghdad:"

This is a good summary of the anti-American slurs that will bloom like a million flowers in the Old European press. Let's run through Baghdad Bob's arguments, along with a few easy rebuttals:

1) The Americans are not liberators. (Gee, could have fooled me.)
2) The Americans tolerate anarchy and looting. (So Bob wants the marines to shoot them or what?)
3) Innocent people have been killed. (About a thousand, a good day or two's work for Saddam.)
4) The jubilant Iraqis are hypocrites. (And Bob calls Americans arrogant.)
5) The Yanks are ignorant about Iraq. (Well, they know more about it than you do, Bob.)
6) The Brits are superior to the Yanks. (I don't mind British gloating. I mind British gloating coming from Bob.)
7) The Americans propped up and armed Saddam. It's all their fault. (Big Lie. Try the Russians and the French.)
8) The new government in Iraq will be as bloody as the old one. (I bet it isn't.)
9) The Iraqis believe the Yanks want the oil. (For the last time, it's not about the oil.)
10) The Americans are naive fools. (Who's a fool? Maybe the guy who hasn't been right once in his career.)
11) Disaster awaits America in Iraq. (You hope so, Bob, you hope so, you swine.)
12) The Iraqis are dangerous and barbarous. (That's what we call racism where I come from.)
13) The Americans murdered foreign journalists. (That's completely absurd. See Jack Slater's piece.)
14) The Americans are the new imperial masters. (Two answers. A) the US is the nicest imperial master in history. The Brits would be second. B) that sentence makes more sense without the word 'new'.)
15) The "Americans' new friends", i.e. the Iraqi opposition, is corrupt. (Give them a chance.)
16) The US and its Iraqi puppets will get rich. (The US is already rich. Let's hope the Iraqis get richer.)
17) Israeli interests are behind it all. (Bob, you're an anti-Semitic bastard, aren't you?)

I think those are approximately all the existent anti-American arguments related to this here war against Saddam. Baghdad Bob got 'em all into one article. And the Vanguardia put it on the front page.

I'm laughing. Baghdad Bob is having a conniption fit. It's all over, Bob! You lost! You were wrong! You're the laughingstock of the world! So what else is new?