"Reuters, which, as we know, is no friend of Bush or American policy."

I never knew that. If so, that's to be welcomed, since any news gathering agency surely ought to avoid being friends with any party in a dispute.

This weird term "Caucasians" - it's a daft term anyway, but surely the strange people who cobbled it together classed "Semites" as non-Caucasian, and that would include Arabs as well as Jews.

Iraqis are of course the same sort of colour as people from Spain and Italy, if that is what is meant.

They aren't all Muslim either - about one in 20 are Catholics, and generally speaking the country is free from the kind of discrimination and persecution of Christians that disfigures some other countries in the region. That doesn't mean it's a nice government, just that things are more complicated than they get painted sometimes.

Whether any replacement regime would be a great improvement is an open question. I notice from today's paper that stoning for adultery is still legal in Afghanistan.