On one of the bleakest days since the invasion began, US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld yesterday shrugged off turmoil and looting in Iraq as signs of the people's freedom.

"It's untidy, and freedom's untidy," he said, jabbing his hand in the air. "Free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things. They're also free to live their lives and do wonderful things."

Mr Rumsfeld insisted that words such as anarchy and lawlessness were unrepresentative of the situation in Iraq and "absolutely" ill-chosen.

"I picked up a newspaper today and I couldn't believe it," he said. "I read eight headlines that talked about chaos, violence, unrest. And it just was Henny Penny - 'The sky is falling'. I've never seen anything like it! And here is a country that's being liberated, here are people who are going from being repressed and held under the thumb of a vicious dictator, and they're free. And all this newspaper could do, with eight or 10 headlines, they showed a man bleeding, a civilian, who they claimed we had shot - one thing after another. It's just unbelievable ..."

In an extraordinary performance reminiscent of the Iraqi information minister who assured the world that all was well even as battles raged visibly around him, Mr Rumsfeld quipped:

"The images you are seeing on television you are seeing over, and over, and over, and it's the same picture of some person walking out of some building with a vase, and you see it 20 times, and you think, 'My goodness, were there that many vases? Is it possible that there were that many vases in the whole country?' "

[link|http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/dailybriefing/story/0,12965,935381,00.html|http://www.guardian....65,935381,00.html]

One is tempted to wonder whether Rummy might have been one of those who deplored the media hysteria on the occasion of the Rodney King riots--or, pardon me, would that not have been "uprisings," Mister Secretary, "repressed" folks being frisky?--but of course, none of the oxen being gored in Baghdad were quartered anywhere near his set, and attention paid to the looting ("Look, you fools, look! Happy natives kissing our soldiers and pulling down statues of the Beastly Adversary! Over here, look!") is attention diverted from the Big Picture.

As to "Is it possible that there were that many vases in the whole country?" --there were, Rummy, and some of them, now vanished, were thousands of years old. But these could not, of course, have been of the remotest interest save to pointy-headed intellectuals who couldn't park their bicycles straight--if I may borrow a soubriquet from SecDef's cultural ancestor, the late George Wallace.

cordially,