They're not all drawn from vituperative anti-Americanism or moral equivocation, according to the British Daily Telegraph:

George Galloway, the Labour backbencher, received money from Saddam Hussein's regime, taking a slice of oil earnings worth at least £375,000 a year, according to Iraqi intelligence documents found by The Daily Telegraph in Baghdad.

[...]

For more than a decade, Mr Galloway, MP for Glasgow Kelvin, has been the leading critic of Anglo-American policy towards Iraq, campaigning against sanctions and the war that toppled Saddam.

He led the Mariam Appeal, named after an Iraqi child he flew to Britain for leukaemia treatment. The campaign was the supposed beneficiary of his fund-raising.

But the papers say that, behind the scenes, Mr Galloway was conducting a relationship with Iraqi intelligence. Among documents found in the foreign ministry was a memorandum from the chief of the Mukhabarat to Saddam's office on Jan 3, 2000, marked "Confidential and Personal".

The document in question leaves a wonderful crawling sensation in your skin. What precious wisdom and righteousness, all for less than half a million pounds a year!

A tip of the hat to Andrew Sullivan for the links as well as his poignant observation. If true, this will be quite "a bombshell." The intransigent left is just that; they'll just as soon canonize the man if denial can't parry overwhelming evidence. But this is important for the many people in the West who are busy raising families and holding down honest jobs with no time for politics if they were inclined so to begin with. These vital people, certainly the majority of Americans, have nevertheless supported this war through a combination of common sense and trust in the president, fortified by his stunning case and subsequent military victory. A moment such as this one, wrenching aside the flower-bedecked curtain to expose anti-liberation for what it is, is tonic for the trust between president and constituency. The everyman can be confident in his support, fully aware if he wasn't before of what kind of conscience opposes him - it certainly isn't a pious one.

Remember: those against the liberation of Iraq were working, mindful or nescient, to perpetuate this.

Good has triumphed: Hallelujah.

Photographs and wire reports of Iraqi demonstrations against the hands that saved them are likely to become news over the next days in the chilly vacuum of statelessness - and a temporary rallying cry for anti-liberation voices.

I'm not worried. This is less an Iraqi ambition as it is imported incendiary. The first paragraph says it all:

Tens of thousands of Iraqi Muslims took to the streets of Baghdad after Friday prayers today to demand the departure of U.S. and other foreign troops and the establishment of an Islamic state.

The same Muslim preachers who are flapping their arms about theocracy are exactly the kind who will attempt to teach their flock the same fear with which they regard the United States. A manifestly powerful democracy with a strong divide between politician and pulpit - and the resolve to enforce the same governmental safeguards around the world - is Islamism's greatest threat. I'd sooner find a gold medal Nigerian bobsledding team than would the Bush administration allow Islamofascists - the pumping, twisted heart of Near East terrorism - to take up root in secular, modern Iraq. So the various clerics will rant and rave, taking advantage of a hysteria brewing up in this lawlessness. Mischief from Iran and Syria has already begun - the recent murder of the Shiite clerics in Najaf is clearly the conspired work of the enemy. Twisted Islam is the vein for toxins, and these two unrepentant dictatorships are sure to want Iraqi democracy killed quickly and cleanly.

As I've said before: Iraq is our Normandy. Expect a proverbial Berlin to fight our troops every step of the way.

We're not there yet - and that's a good sign. The less people fantasizing about terrorism and dictatorship spontaneously disappearing in a cartoonish whiff of grey, the more resolve and focus the free world can claim. We'll need it.

Life in post-Saddam Iraq won't be all roses - and right away we're discovering just what sorts of obstacles will be left in the rubble of the Ba'athist nightmare. Kurds are returning to lands from where they were banished years ago. Problem? Otherwise innocent Arabs had since been shuttled and planted there, part of Saddam's deranged, Nazi-like "Arabization." Not surprsingly, some Kurds are being rather brutish about their return; marking the houses of Arabs "taken" and pushing them out.

Don't hyperventilate or smugly sit back in misanthropic "We're in over our head" ecstasy. Within free societies, all disputes - even contentious or violent ones - can and will be settled. We've had our Bloody Kansases, our Italian-Irish or white-black riots; and ultimately, the parties concerned have learned to live with one another. When the heart is free to bleed, good nature prevails. And in the hearts of many free Iraqis, generosity may already be flowing:

Bamed, a grammar school teacher, said he left the house to go to the countryside during the war, returning April 14 to find it had been taken, with "girow" scrawled on the front.

Rahim, wearing the beige wool outfit of the Kurdish peshmerga warrior, said he realizes Bamed and his family might not have known that the land had belonged to someone else when they moved there 16 years ago.

"Let him come live with me," Rahim said, "side by side."

Guided and protected, Iraqis will find their way.

Victor Davis Hanson enthuses about the indelibility of honor in the American spirit, particularly in our armed forces:

[T]he lethality of the military is not just organizational or a dividend of high-technology. Moral and group cohesion explain more still. The general critique of the 1990s was that we had raised a generation with peroxide hair and tongue rings, general illiterates who lounged at malls, occasionally muttering "like" and "you know" in Sean Penn or Valley Girl cadences. But somehow the military has married the familiarity and dynamism of crass popular culture to 19th-century notions of heroism, self-sacrifice, patriotism, and audacity.

The result is that the energy of our soldiers arises from the ranks rather than is imposed from above. What, after all, is the world to make of Marines shooting their way into Baathist houses with Ray-Bans, or shaggy special forces who look like they are strolling in Greenwich Village with M-16s, or tankers with music blaring and logos like "Bad Moon Rising?" The troops look sometimes like cynical American teenagers but they fight and die like Leathernecks on Okinawa. The Arab street may put on shows of goose-stepping suicide bombers, noisy pajama-clad killers, and shrill, masked assassins, but in real battle against gum-chewing American adolescents with sunglasses these street toughs prove to be little more than toy soldiers.

He brushes the immeasurable distinction between citizen soldier and cajoled terrorist. Tell me - where were the mass terror attacks, the mass recruitments, or Hosni Mubarak's "hundred bin Ladens"? We know, whether our political agenda likes it or not: nothing of the sort has come into existence. Evil mass movements - fascist or Islamist, secular or pseudo-religious - are composed of normal people who through willed ignorance or desperate indoctrination will commit the atrocities so called for by their leaders, who are the true epicenters of hatred and want. Like mediums, the masses conduct their masters' evil; long, black, barbed tentacles slithering across the human landscape.

Truly evil men, strong or brutal as they may be, fear the loss of what is most important - themselves - with a naked, unreformed terror and will fight endlessly to prevent their incarceration or destruction.

The bloodlust in followers, however, boils up from a belief gained in the midst of besottedness that their consumption of others will be pleasurable in its ease; panic and horror will grip those on whom they prey for all the better devouring.

Followers of terrorism fed for decades upon the West's abject refusal to confront its roots, stems or horrid blossoms. Regimes, fomenting the culture that begets terrorists, were used as pawns in the Cold War. Every president, from Truman to Reagan, sacrified progress in the Near East for advantage against Moscow. The ten years following the death of the Soviet Union were largely wasted. America and her allies sat complacent with its momentary victory over the communist menace, resistent to the cold nature of human life - that yet another challenge, a sleeping evil, would awake from its undisturbed sessility.

All the while, desperate young men with bleak lives sidled their way into terrorism, increasingly unchallenged and ever-confident.

This horrible pride grew to a head, culminating in an attack against the most powerful free nation on earth: and finally capturing its undivided attention.

Those desperate young men who have passed through the doors of Islamist terrorism desire, in their maddened deprivation, to be masters over people of whose lives they envy furiously. Terrorism grew to be popular precisely because its twisted constituents expected no reprisal, having enjoying years and years of safety, in shadows, from a timid, near-sighted quarry. Terrorist disciples wanted effortless pleasure and for quite a long time, found it.

But now they face inevitable, violent termination. Terrorism's not the ghoulish fun it used to be. Selfish gain is no virtue, nor is it something for which any man will die if he needn't - witness the flight of the doomed Ba'athists or agents of al Qaeda; or, like their brethren the Nazis or those basking in the Rising Sun. Faced with the astounding resilience of free men fighting for ideals much larger than themselves, Islamism's toy soldiers will, in ever-increasing numbers, drop the costumes - the pillow cases over the head, the fake coffins, the sky-fired rifles, the chants, the bullhorns, the mock explosives strapped to the waist, the headbands, the parades, the false and utterly demonic credos, the lives spent worshipping evil and toiling for the gain of a few - and run.

If they're lucky, they'll stumble upon the life we bring to them: a life of freedom, an embrace of dignity and a rejection of villainy.

Mock the devil and will flee from you.

Mohammed Saeed al Sahhaf, Propaganda Information Minister:

For the first time since Operation Iraqi Freedom was launched three weeks ago, Information Minister Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf failed to appear before reporters with claims of glorious battlefield victories by Iraqi troops. And for the first time in decades, Iraqis were defacing images of the man who ruled brutally for nearly a quarter century.

One wall painting was spraypainted with black devil's horns, eyeglasses and a black chin beard.

uBlog Analysis: First of all, I've got to find a photo of the devil-horn-eyeglasses-goatee graffiti. But for al Sahhaf: running like hell to be caught, tried and sentenced to prison - or else hanging from a lamppost with his gaggle of "minders."

Mohammed al Douri, United Nations ambassador:

Iraq's U.N. ambassador said Wednesday "the game is over" and he expressed hope that the Iraqi people will be able to live in peace. Mohammed Al-Douri's comments to reporters outside his residence were the first admission by an Iraqi official that U.S.-led coalition troops had overwhelmed Iraqi forces.

"My work now is peace," he said. "The game is over and I hope the peace will prevail. I hope the Iraqi people will have a happy life."

Al-Douri said he has had no communications with Iraq for a long time because of the war.

Earlier, the ambassador told Associated Press Television News: "This is a war and there will be a winner and someone who is a loser."

When asked what he thought about the scenes being broadcast from Baghdad, he said, "Well I don't know really, I watch the television like you."

Translation: "Hey-y-y-y, you know, I was for freedom the whole time. Outta sight! I wish you all the best but - ooh! Look at the time - I've got to be going, so if you'll just excuse me..."

uBlog Analysis: Extradited, tried, convicted, sentenced to reasonable prison time. If France doesn't sweep him under diplomatic immunity, that is.

Who cares? They've been wrong about everything up to today; I don't anticipate any departure from their direct express to turbid madness. Besides; Iraqis know the score.

Iraqis and GIs work together to topple a Saddamite statue (FOX News).