THE ARAB NEWS seeems to have changed its tune recently:

In the case of Iraq, though, any new government would be an improvement over the repressive and thuggish regime of Saddam Hussein.

As some Muslim commentators have been eager to point out, most notably the Iranian-born Amir Taheri writing this past week in both the Jerusalem Post and National Review, Saddam does not have widespread support either with Arab regimes or the Arab street. Having killed many Islamists and Nasserites, Saddam is not liked by Al-Qaeda supporters or the Arab left. Taheri predicts that the Arab street will not erupt into fury if Saddam is overthrown, which is probably true. The irony is that although most of the Muslim world will probably welcome regime change in Iraq, it will also probably resent the fact that it was the Americans who did it.

Yeah, kind of like, well, everybody else.

UPDATE: Gary Farber says he has comments on this, but at the moment Blogspot isn’t working, so I don’t know what they say. I’m about ready to join with Rachel Lucas in the “Blogspot is the devil” camp. I’m constantly getting email complaining that my links to blogspot blogs don’t work. They work when I put ’em up, but God knows whether blogspot will be up later, or whether it’ll send you somewhere besides the item the link was originally pointing at, or whatever.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader John Tuttle writes that Dianne Feinstein apparently isn’t reading the Arab News:

I just watched Sen Dianne Feinstein live on Fox News try to scare Americans that liberating Iraq (my term) unilaterally, pre-emptively attacking Iraq (her view) will unite the Arab world against us. Sen DiFi is also putting the interests of the UN ahead of the interests of the US and the American People. The UN somehow has the moral authority to attack Iraq, but the government that she is part of, doesn’t have that moral authority. Go figure.

I actually thought that Feinstein got a bit of a bum rap for her remark about being “embarrassed” to wear an American flag pin, since the remark was less offensive in context than some people made it sound. But one reason why most people didn’t give her the benefit of the doubt on that remark was the broader context provided by other things she says.