Stardate 20030410.1526

(On Screen): In a demonstration of brazen hypocrisy, the leaders of France and Germany both "hailed" the fall of Iraq. After months of saying that war is always wrong and can never lead to anything except tragedy and is always a failure, suddenly they've decided that it was a good thing after all.

Of course, it's kind of hard to ignore the fact that the Iraqi people themselves are increasingly demonstrating their enthusiasm about it all, or some of the stories which are beginning to come out about just how truly awful life was for Iraq's civilians.

Of course, they're in a bind of their own making. It's blatantly evident now that they were wrong to oppose the war, and they can either backtrack or continue to defend a position seen as increasingly idiotic. Belgian Foreign Minister Louis Michel continues to condemn the war, at least for the moment.

Michel stuck to his strident opposition to the war after US troops moved into Baghdad after three weeks of fighting to topple Saddam Hussein.

Victory had come about "at too high a price" in terms of human and physical destruction, he told Le Soir, which like other newspapers across the world front-paged a photograph of a giant statue of the Iraqi leader being torn down.

"I remain firmly convinced that we could have reached this result through diplomatic means," Michel added.

He said he had no regrets about spearheading diplomatic opposition to the United States in the run-up to the war.

"If I had to do it again, I would do exactly the same thing," he said. "I would plead in the same way for peace and for the exploration of all diplomatic avenues."

Whether removal of Saddam from power as such, "regime change" as such, could have been achieved diplomatically, there can be no question that it could not have happened as rapidly or as conclusively as it actually has. And given that the entire purpose of the French/German/Belgian initiative was to keep Saddam in power, it's doubtful if "this result" would have happened at all if they'd prevailed.

If he doesn't already, Michel is going to end up looking like a complete fool.

There was a report from the BBC which frankly astounds me, if it is true:

BBC correspondent Emma Jane Kirby, in Paris, says that many French people, who believed this was an illegal and hot-headed war, have been stunned by the welcome American forces received in Baghdad on Wednesday.

One of my readers, an American living in France, wrote to me yesterday to say:

The French here are starting to feel very embarrassed, which is exactly what they deserve.

How could those pictures from Baghdad have come as a surprise to anyone living in a cosmopolitan western nation? I gather that a lot of the French expected the American entry into Baghdad to be a reenactment of Paris in 1940, with a sullen and angry populace shaking their fists at the hated Yanks. Instead, it was Paris in 1944.

They seem to have thought that the Iraqis shared their opinion that Saddam was bad but America is worse. It seems they are surprised to discover that the Iraqi people don't agree. And perhaps even more surprised that the German embassy and the French cultural center were just looted. Don't the Iraqis understand who their true friends were and are?

You bet they do, and that may be part of what's causing this intellectual dislocation. It's "cognitive dissonance"; the march of events makes no sense in terms of their preconceptions. And one of the reasons why is that their press has been systematically distorting the news.

Another is that both Chirac and Schröder have been using public anti-Americanism as ways of deflecting voter attention away from deep domestic problems in both nations. It's going to be interesting to see what kind of political fallout emerges as more and more stories emerge from Iraq about how much improved things will be for Iraq's citizens, especially since the war was fought while inflicting such a low level of casualties, apparently on everyone involved. As they begin to weigh the evidence of the evil oppression that the Iraqi people have been freed from against the light human cost of the war on Iraq, it's going to be increasingly difficult to look at it in retrospect and condemn it, unless your condemnation is due to blind hatred of America. Not to mention the fact that their economies are going to suffer directly because of it.

There's other evidence of apparent French embarrassment. It's odd to even talk about that, because "French embarrassment" is virtually an oxymoron. But in a poll done about the war about April 4th, 81% were found to oppose the war.

52% wanted the coalition to win, and 8% said they wanted Iraq to win. And fully 40% refused to say, which leads to the suspicion that most of them also wanted Iraq to win but didn't want to admit it.

In the mean time, the French are