The A-List Crazies Are Awfully Silent
The always reliably entertaining Mark Steyn assays the current state of Iraqi propaganda and concludes it indicates a lot of top Iraqi leaders are, uh, dead.

So is he dead? No, not Saddam. We'll come to him later. I'm thinking of Tariq Aziz. Iraq's Deputy Prime Minister is a Christian and, even though he's a Scud-lobbing Kurd-gassing Christian, that's what passes for pluralism in the Middle East, and Baghdad is savvy enough to use him as their chief Western media spokesperson. So why isn't Tariq on CNN and the BBC right now? Why isn't he claiming that the imperialist aggressors have slaughtered thousands of innocent women and children?.

That's what he was doing on the first weekend of the last Gulf War. Everywhere you looked he was busy accusing "the imperialist American-Atlantic-Zionist alliance and its traitor followers" of carrying out "aggressive, indiscriminate and deliberate raids" on food factories, a sports stadium, a museum, a church, a textile plant, a health centre, a passenger train, a sugar factory, a baby-milk factory and a water-purification plant. Hundreds of civilians had died, he insisted. Mr. Aziz didn't expect to get anywhere with the American-Atlantic-Zionist crowd but he'd issued a stirring call to the Non-Aligned Movement to help support Iraq in its struggle to build "a new world order." Isn't this just the sort of stuff to cheer the hearts of Svend Robinson and Harold Pinter and the other Western Saddamites marching for "peace"?

But on the opening weekend of Gulf War II Tariq Aziz was silent. Even though perking up Svend and Co. is far more critical to Baghdad's strategy this time round, Iraq's Mister Available isn't returning his messages. He hasn't been seen since last Wednesday when some curiously timed rumours were floated that he'd either defected or been shot in the attempt. Saddam ordered him to go on TV and deny it. He did, and then left the studios to go to a meeting of the inner council. The meeting was broken up in the early hours of Thursday morning when the Pentagon dropped a bunker-buster on it. We don't know for sure who was inside and who got out. But an awful lot of Baghdad's A-list crazies seem to have cut back on their personal appearances since, oh, Thursday a.m.

As they say, read the whole thing.