Breaking News: Baghdad Falls to Americans, Population Jubilant

Catalunya TV is reporting right now, live from the Palestine Hotel in downtown Baghdad, that an enormous column of American tanks has rolled into downtown Baghdad without meeting resistance. Saddam's forces have collapsed. The people are out in the streets of the residential areas, cheering and defacing portraits of Saddam as they denounce his murderous dictatorship and shout "We love Mister Bush!" The fear is gone. The Fedayeen and what's left of the troops seem to have disappeared.

Indignant Iraqis showed Catalunya TV reporters a prison with a torture chamber where Saddam's victims were imprisoned and murdered. There is widespread looting and there is no police presence. The American forces do not have complete control of the populace and right now the situation is chaotic. It doesn't look like there are out-of-control mobs or fratricidal murders, though, at least not for now. My impression from seeing the film is that the people are, first, very happy, and second, willing to obey, more or less, the standard rules of human society.

The Marines have now flooded the center of the city. Catalunya TV has "come over to our side"; they can't help but admit that the bad guys have lost and the good guys have won. Now, as images from Al Jazeera of the Americans taking over downtown are on screen, they are already beginning to pontificate about the new international order of preventative warfare that has been established.