SHOCK AND AWE: David Warren writes:

The sight of Iraqis in Baghdad pulling down the statue of Saddam, beating its face with their shoes, and kissing photographs of President Bush thus arrived like a missile into what Fouad Ajami has so discerningly called, “the dream palace of the Arabs” — the collective fantasy into which powerful media such as Al-Jazeera had been playing. It was no mere surprise; it was a profound shock to the entire nervous system of the Arab world. It was the first shock on anything like this scale since June 1967, when another generation of Arabs woke to the discovery that tiny Israel had destroyed the massed armies of all the most powerful Arab states, in just six days. But that did not happen with the immediacy of live television.

And it is precisely the same story everywhere, the same audience reactions when the joy of the liberated Baghdadis was presented on screen, and almost without commentary. Wherever this spectacle appeared, there was weeping, anger, then flicking off the TV. But the anger previously concentrated by the Arab world ‘s media and leaders upon the United States, Britain, and Israel, was suddenly deflected upon the same media and leaders; or else meaninglessly against the euphoric crowds in Baghdad. Those who swore were suddenly swearing not at CNN but at Al-Jazeera, not at George W. Bush, but at Saddam, and Saudi sheikhs, and Hosni Mubarak. Suddenly, all at once, this terrible recognition that they had been lied to — lied to by everyone; lied to on an extraordinary, systematic scale; told the biggest Lie that had ever been told.

But it’s not just the Arabs:

Take, for comparison, the situation in Russia, and put yourself in the position of Russian TV viewers, taking in the same scene from Baghdad.

They know what their army does to Grozny, in Chechnya, and how little thanks they get for it. The Russian military brass had moreover been telling pan-Slavic TV audiences that the Americans only do “non-contact” wars, that they are sissies who rely on technology and get locals to do the icky ground fighting for them, as in Afghanistan. I’ve seen the same message repeated endlessly in Russian media websites. Imagine the shock, for people accustomed to this view, of now seeing plainly the U.S. on the ground, in Baghdad, taking fire, with very low casualties — and in charge, after barely three weeks of war.

The obvious questions present themselves to the more independent Russian mind: “How come Brits and Yanks can pull this off, and all Putin’s soldiers can do is spread carnage? How come Putin’s special-op elites kill more civilians re-taking one lousy concert hall than the Yanks do taking Baghdad? Are we really so well served by that old KGB officer?”

Yep. The ramifications of this will be interesting and, I think, largely positive. Steven Den Beste thinks so too. Er, and was Aziz Poonawalla really expecting a terse list of bullet-points from SDB, of all people?

UPDATE: Note: the Den Beste link above went to the wrong post. Fixed now.