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After a couple of weeks away, I return to spend a lonely evening talking to myself at the eerily deserted Armchair Warmongers Club (Fleet Street Branch). Where'd everybody go? A year ago, Anatole Kaletsky was buoyant and sunny: "The vast majority of Iraqis will soon find themselves incomparably freer and better off than at any time in the past 50 years." Now he's sunk in his own columnar quagmire: "Iraq will indeed now replace Vietnam as the byword for America's military humiliation, its strategic incompetence, its wayward moral compass," etc, etc. His Times colleague Mary Ann Sieghart has flounced off,...

Memorial Day in my corner of New Hampshire is always the same. A clutch of veterans from the Second World War to the Gulf march round the common, followed by the town band, and the scouts, and the fifth-graders. The band plays "Anchors Aweigh," "My Country, 'Tis of Thee," "God Bless America" and, in an alarming nod to modernity, Ray Stevens' "Everything Is Beautiful (In Its Own Way)" (Billboard No. 1, May 1970). One of the town's selectmen gives a short speech, so do a couple of representatives from state organizations, and then the fifth-graders recite the Gettsyburg Address and...

Here's a story no American news organization thought worth covering last week, so you'll just have to take it from me. In the southern Iraqi town of Amara, 20 men from Scotland's Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders came under attack from 100 or so of Muqtada al-Sadr's ''insurgents.'' So they fixed bayonets and charged. It was the first British bayonet charge since the Falklands War 20 years ago. And at the end of it some 35 of the enemy were dead in return for three minor wounds on the Argylls' side. If you're used to smart bombs, unmanned drones and doing...

One thing I noticed in Iraq was the missing body parts. Not immediately. I spend most of my time in the Great North Woods of New Hampshire and Quebec and, when you're in old mill towns, it's not unusual to find yourself sitting at a lunch counter with three codgers who can barely muster 10 fingers between them. So at first I didn't pay much attention to the missing digits and missing limbs. It was the third missing ear I saw — in Ramadi — that made me realize what was really going on. An ear's a hard thing to...

A decade ago, Elizabeth Taylor was going from one celebrity Aids rally to another urging us to make sure we “use a condom each and every time you make love”. Every time, Liz? Apparently so, until one day mankind is extinct and giant condoms roam the earth, bouncing across the ruins of our civilization like playful prophylactics in animated Scandinavian health-ministry announcements. The spirit of Liz lurked just below the surface at Washington’s Million Abortionist March or whatever it was called. For people who talked endlessly about “reproductive rights”, they seemed remarkably indifferent, if not downright hostile, to exercising them....

'Just look at the way US army reservist Lynndie England holds the leash of the naked, bearded Iraqi," writes Robert Fisk, famed Middle East correspondent of the London Independent. "Take a close look at the leather strap, the pain on the prisoner's face. No sadistic movie could outdo the damage of this image. In September 2001, the planes smashed into the buildings; today, Lynndie smashes to pieces our entire morality with just one tug on the leash." Hmm. Sounds like Fiskie's the one straining at the leash here. You can practically hear him panting. Down, boy. For a week now,...

John Kerry said something amazing the other day. He was talking to the Wall Street Journal and was asked about his many attacks on ''Benedict Arnold CEOs'' -- for example: ''We will repeal every single benefit, every single loophole, every single reward for any Benedict Arnold CEO or corporation that take American jobs overseas and stick you with the bill.'' (Kerry in Virginia, Feb. 10) Senator Flippy has now decided this line is nonoperative. As he told the chaps at the Journal, ''You know, I called a couple of times to overzealous speechwriters and said 'Look, that's not what I'm...

Six figures in masks enter the Office of Special Plans in Washington. They greet each other under portraits of Leo Strauss: COVE: … and this ignoramus writer says to me “The father of the neocons invented blue jeans?” I was embarrassed for him. “Leo,” I said, “you pecker. Not Levi. Leo Strauss.” DICK: Gentlemen, gentlemen, settle down. I’d like to call this meeting of the Office of Special Plans to order. Rum Rum, how does it look? RUM RUM: We are currently sufficiently deployed, locked and loaded, cocked and ready, champin’ at the bit, poised for engagement, steady ready Freddy....

Canada is officially beyond parody. The latest development in Flagscam is that those Sheila Copps Maple Leafs — the flags needed to keep Quebec in Confederation, the flags only a $6 million Government program could organize, the flags whose $6 million Government program ballooned to $45 million, the flags whose free distribution wiped out the profits of Canadian flag retailers, the flags that no-one in Canada could make fast enough and so wound up being secretly imported from overseas, the flags for which millions of dollars were paid to well-connected Liberal Party middle-men for doing nothing, the flags for which...

There was an hilarious piece in the Washington Post on Sunday, under the plaintive headline, "Why Did Bush Take My Job?" The author was Saeb Erekat, and the job he claims Bush has taken from him is "senior Palestinian negotiator" with the Israelis. The other day, speaking in support of the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, President Bush stated the obvious: it was "unrealistic" to expect a return to the armistice lines of 1949, and there’s no point wasting time discussing the Palestinian "right of return" to what’s now Israel, because it’s never going to happen. But this shift in favour...

It's a good rule of thumb that so-called moderate opinion is several degrees to the left of popular opinion. You can test this for yourself easily enough: pick a subject such as, say, illegal immigration and compare the position of every Democratic senator, the majority of Republican senators and 90 percent of the media with the position of the American people. That's why the press were befuddled by last week's polls. A month of Richard Clarke, the 9/11 Commission, Bob Woodward, Muqtada al-Sadr, Fallujah and Basra, and a constant drip-drip-drip of conventional wisdom on the president's "vulnerability" from the Beltway...

'War without the UN is unthinkable," huffed The Guardian's Polly Toynbee a year ago, just before it happened. For a certain type of person, any action on the international scene without the UN is unthinkable. And, conversely, anything that happens under the UN imprimatur is mostly for the unthinking. No matter how corrupt and depraved it is in practice, the organisation's sunny utopian image endures. Say the initials "UN" to your average member of Ms Toynbee's legions of the unthinking and they conjure up not UN participation in the sex-slave trade in Bosnia, nor the UN refugee extortion racket in...

Wallowing in nuance, Dems lack resolve April 25, 2004 BY MARK STEYN SUN-TIMES COLUMNIST It's a good rule of thumb that so-called moderate opinion is several degrees to the left of popular opinion. You can test this for yourself easily enough: pick a subject such as, say, illegal immigration and compare the position of every Democratic senator, the majority of Republican senators and 90 percent of the media with the position of the American people. That's why the press were befuddled by last week's polls. A month of Richard Clarke, the 9/11 Commission, Bob Woodward, Muqtada al-Sadr, Fallujah and Basra,...

Mark Steyn says that the US President’s ‘transformational’ response to Muslim fundamentalism can save the Old World; European ‘managerialism’ can’t New Hampshire Last July, speaking to the United States Congress, the only assembly on the planet in which he’s still assured of a warm reception, Tony Blair remarked: ‘As Britain knows, all predominant power seems for a time invincible but, in fact, it is transient. The question is: What do you leave behind?’ Excellent question. Britannia will never again wield the unrivalled power she enjoyed at her imperial apogee, but the Britannic inheritance endures, to one degree or another, in...

Americans don't get Europe. On the day of the Madrid massacre, I received a ton of e-mails from US readers along the lines of: "3/11 is Europe's 9/11. Even the French will be in." Friends told me, "The Europeans get it now." Doughty warriors of the blogosphere posted the Spanish flag on their home pages in solidarity with our loyal allies in the war against terrorism. John Ellis, a savvy guy with a smart website, declared that "Every member state of the EU understands that Madrid is Rome is Berlin is Amsterdam is Paris is London is New York." All...

I was sorry to see Niall Ferguson, currently living high off the hog in the bosom of the Great Satan, reduced to peddling the Max Hastings bloody-ignorant-Yanks-blundering-around-the-world line in Saturday’s Telegraph. He trotted through a brisk precis of the 1920 Iraqi uprising against the British and then wrote confidently: "I am willing to bet that not one senior military commander in Iraq today knows the slightest thing about these events." I’ll take that bet! What do you fancy? Ten thousand bucks per commander, rising commensurately as we go down the ranks? Last year, at a roadblock in the desert between...

The coalition approach to Iraq was summed up a year ago by a British colonel. Explaining how they were trying to secure Basra without blowing up buildings and causing a lot of death and destruction, he said, ''We don't want to go in and rattle all their teacups.'' The avoidance of teacup-rattling remains a priority. Last week in Fallujah, American troops had rockets fired at them from a mosque. So they fired back, but with the state-of-the-art laser-guided weaponry that kills the insurgents but leaves the mosque virtually untouched. I'd have been quite happy to see it blown up with...

Some Bush-loathers rejoiced in the Fallujah atrocities: There is a virus of hate in the Democratic party On 31 March, four civilian contractors to the Coalition Authority in Iraq were ambushed in Fallujah. They were shot, burned, mutilated, and what was left was then dangled from a bridge while the townsfolk danced for joy in the street. On his website The Daily Kos, Markos Zuniga marked the passing of these four individuals: ‘I feel nothing over the death of merceneries [sic]. They aren’t in Iraq because of orders, or because they are there trying to help the people make Iraq...

How about that Richard Clarke! He's the bureaucrat-turned-book-tour celebrity who began his testimony to Congress by issuing a dramatic apology to the American people for the Administration's failure to prevent 9/11: "Your government failed you, those entrusted with protecting you failed you and I failed you." Hey, thanks for that, big guy. But, if you want an example of a President doing nothing to prevent not thousands but the best part of a million deaths, how about the Rwandan genocide? Remember that? It was exactly a decade ago, and the media commemorations so far are, to say the least, low-key....

"We're Sending You A Cluster Bomb From Jesus." I can't quite believe my old Loose Ends confrere Alistair Beaton has written a song by this name. But apparently so: Bush and Blair sing it in his new satire of the war on terror at the Birmingham Rep. Charles Spencer pronounced the show a stinker. "There is," he wrote, "one kind of laughter I loathe, and Follow My Leader is full of it. It is the smug, complacent laughter of theatre-goers revelling in their own sense of moral superiority as a dramatist shamelessly panders to their prejudices." Alistair was always a...