From the Guardian online:

In a speech in Washington three days [after pre-war meetings with Tony Blair] [former U.S. President Bill] Clinton said the UN's chief weapons inspector, Hans Blix, should set the timetable for [Iraqi] compliance [with United Nations resolutions], adding: "I hope the United States would agree to that amount of time, whatever it is."

Oh my.

It isn't that Blair was seeking the advice of Clinton (who at that moment had no more information about the Iraqi situation that he knew from the news reports, which is to say no more than the rest of us had) that bothers me. It's the fact that the man who was supposed to have been The Most Intelligent President In Our Nation's History had no idea what the role of UN weapons inspectors was.

Not that he was alone in his ignorance. It boggles the mind how many people actually thought Hans Blix was a really important cop executing the mother of all search warrants, his job being to either 1) find Iraq's banned weapons, or 2) prove they didn't exist. It's humorous when you think about it, a group the size of the UN inspection team combing a country the size of Iraq. Such a group charged with such a task in such a country would have been doomed to failure, which is probably why France wanted them to continue. But in reality, the onus was always on the Saddam Hussein regime to 1) 'fess up to what they did have, and/or 2) document the destruction of what they no longer had.

And how did we know he had banned weapons in the first place? Besides intelligence and reports of Iraqi defectors, the Hussein regime said at the time of the first Gulf War that they had them. It was a condition of the cease-fire in 1991 that those weapons be destroyed and their destruction documented. And it was supposed to have been done within 90 days. Weapons inspectors were then supposed to go in and verify what had been documented.

Given that Iraq insisted that they no longer had the banned weapons and refused to say what happened to them, Blix couldn't possibly have done his job. Nor could he have set, as suggested by the oh-so-helpful Clinton, a "timetable for compliance," since the timetable had already been set -- and missed, nearly 12 years ago.

If he can miss something so obvious, Bill Clinton clearly isn't as smart as he wants us all to think he is.

From FoxNews.com:

"We discovered that all what the [Iraqi] information minister was saying was all lies," said Ali Hassan, a government employee in Cairo, Egypt.

And, from the same source, this observation:

Some Arab journalists were subdued and others incredulous as they watched Iraqis cheering the fall of Saddam Hussein's Baghdad. "The surreal scene this afternoon was unthinkable until yesterday," Arab satellite television station Al-Jazeera reporter Maher Abdullah said Wednesday. "Nobody could dream of it. If someone had told me this, I would have told him 'impossible.'"

So it was that as Baghdad fell yesterday, the Arab world reportedly was stunned not only that it happened so quickly but that it happened at all. They never saw it coming. Talk about "shock and awe."

It makes you wonder where they've been for the past three weeks.

There is a central tenet of Arab sociopolitical thought, an essential element of faith, if you will: America is bad. And if you adopt, even for purposes of discussion, that premise, the reaction in the Arab world to yesterday's events makes perfect sense. Since the start of the war, these people saw news reports of coalition Generals describing military gains, rebutted immediately and forcefully by Iraqi official declarations that it was all a lie, "an illusion." Within the context of their presumptions, it fit. They could believe the official Iraqi line.

Now that the "information" minister and his deputies are absent without leave and the Americans have, oops, arrived in downtown Baghdad, the people of an entire region of the world are coming to terms with a reality that doesn't fit with what they always thought (knew?) to be true. The only way to reconcile one with the other is to accept that one of them is wrong. The choice seems logical, but it isn't that simple.

Arab/Muslim identity is evidently so intertwined with anti-western and, specifically, anti-American rage that entire populations seem incapable of any sort of self-awareness without it. It's not unlike white supremacists and neo-segregationists in our own country whose sense of self-worth seems utterly dependent on the notion of non-white inferiority. Or schoolyard bullies who are only important when they can terrorize others. Talk about existential angst. Without someone else to loathe, they don't know who they themselves are. Aided and abetted by rulers who don't want their own power base challenged from within or without, this view of themselves vis-a-vis the "infidels" requires them to blame someone else, always someone else, for what's not right.

After World War II, there were people who refused to believe that the Holocaust had happened. In spite of the photos, the newsreels, the eyewitness accounts by liberating forces, the admissions of captured Nazi officials, and the testimonies of survivors, there remained a few who would not, could not, believe that the German government had done such a thing, that the German people would have allowed such a thing. They reconciled the contradiction by fabricating the theory of conspiracy, that someone ELSE was to blaime. The sinister forces of Germany's enemies—in cahoots, of course, with The Jews—had obviously staged an elaborate ruse. It is a mindset that unfortunately persists.

And so it is in the Arab world and will be, I am certain, 10, 20, 50 years from now. There will be people who will simply never accept that when it comes right down to it, they had it wrong all along. They will take their anger at Iraq's now former (dis)information minister, or whatever/whoever bothers them in the future, and blame it on ... America. Which doesn't make sense, until you understand that they will never be able to accept that it is the central tenet of Arab sociopolitical thought that is the real illusion.