Media coverage of the capture has been as surreal as the Democrats' conspiracy conjectures. After watching jubilant Iraqis celebrating Saddam's apprehension, ABC anchor Peter Jennings saw only sadness and morosely concluded, "There's not a good deal for Iraqis to be happy about at the moment." Jennings "informed" the American public that life for Iraqi citizens is "very chaotic ... beset by violence ... (and) not as stable for them as it was when Saddam Hussein was in power."
It is a strange state of affairs when U.N. diplomats, displaying an imperious non-accountability that pretty much went out of style with the divine right of Bourbons, are to be congratulated, sort of, just for acknowledging the existence of facts that need accounting for. That is, in refusing to pin blame, point fingers or comment on the past, they have in fact admitted there is something in the past upon which to pin blame, point fingers and comment. Even this implicit admission, it turns out, is something. Or so it seems after absorbing some of the weirder, practically extraterrestrial exercises in denial of another, even more palpable fact — the capture of Saddam Hussein.