Says Tikrit Tommy Alcoverro in today's Vangua after the terror bombing of a hotel in Baghdad that killed 29:

Next Saturday morning will be the first anniversary of the war in Iraq. The resistance began to remind us of this yesterday with a new massacre in the heart of Baghdad. In the upcoming days and weeks more attentats and massacres are expected, signs of the brutal vulnerability of a country and the failure of an occupation.

Wait a minute. I may be misreading this, but isn't Tikrit Tommy saying that this bombing is somehow the Americans' fault?

Here are a few more sentences from Tikrit Tommy's piece, chosen semi-randomly.

...This capital city, more and more dangerous and sinister...

...the Pandora's Box of this broken and directionless country...

...an underground war that, as happened during the long period of terror in Beirut, is being fed by the intelligence services themselves...without forgetting the great powers...

...There is no doubt the level of violence will increase...

...The worst, in Iraq, is always yet to come...

Now, if your main source of news was La Vanguardia, after reading hysterical defeatism of this sort that TT produces on page 3 and Beirut Bob Fisk on page 6, day in and day out, how might your thinking about international issues be influenced? By the way, I've officially announced my surrender to Beirut Bob. I just cannot stand to try to debate the guy's stuff any more. He's got all the most negative aspects of the British stereotype: he's pissed off about the class system and he hates people he thinks are above him. He doesn't realize he despises those he thinks he himself is superior to--e.g. American soldiers--, but he shows it all the time. He believes himself to be very highly moral and that everyone else is wanting, and he believes mindlessly, foolishly, in the power of the anecdote over the statistic, which I find to be a peculiarly British trait. For Bob, one tragedy like an Iraqi family accidentally getting killed by an American bomb for being at the wrong place at the wrong time is sufficient argument to overcome the general truth that the military intervention has undoubtedly saved thousands of lives more than it has cost.

Oh, yeah, no matter how many times he's been wrong, like the time he claimed that there weren't any American troops in Baghdad airport when the Marines had already taken the place, he'll never admit he was wrong about anything, ever.

Zap's off to a brilliant start internationally. During his campaign he said openly that he hoped Kerry would win and Bush would lose in the American elections, which is not a very good idea if you're going to have to deal with said Bush until January at the very least and probably four more years after that. Luckily, Bush has been a good sport about it, calling Zap to congratulate him. And Kerry just came out and said, in flip-flop #381 of the week, that he doesn't want Spain to pull out its troops. Kerry said that he wanted Zap to "reconsider his position on Iraq. The events in Spain cannot be a reason to pull out. Together, all of us have an interest in the developments in Iraq. Terrorism cannot win through its acts of terror...In my opinion, the new Prime Minister should not have decided to retire from Iraq. He should have said that this will strengthen our determination to get the job done."

What do you know. First time I'm going on record as agreeing with anything John Kerry says. I just hope he doesn't change his mind before, say, tomorrow.