Late last week on one of the cable news programs I saw an obviously well educated Jordanian woman being interviewed for her response to the sudden and ignominious collapse of the regime of Saddam Hussein. She expressed the common shock and humiliation that many Arabs clearly felt at the failure of the Republican Guard to fight to the last man against the Americans and the refusal of Baghdad to offer itself as a second Stalingrad. But she expressed something else as well—a remark that the interviewer did not choose to follow up on, though I wish very much he had.


She said that the sudden collapse could mean only one thing—namely, that we did not yet know what really happened.


But of course we do know what really happened. A genuine army had vanquished a phantom army. And surely the woman being interviewed must have known this, too. Somewhere, at some level of consciousness, she must be aware that what had happened could not possibly have been otherwise, and that the Arab world had been played for suckers by both the Iraqi Minister of Information and by the various Arab media propagandists. They had lied, and these lies had been eagerly, willingly believed.


And yet what the woman's final remark suggested was not that she had enough of such lies, but rather that she was anxious to hear more of them. Anxious, at the very least, to hear a lie that would explain how all the other lies hadn't been lies at all. [...]