As Saddam's Statue Topples in Iraq The Swedes Retreat

A lifeless calm has descended over Sweden. The wide streets, parks and Scandinavian-style piazzas that, just a month before, were crammed with fair-weather socialists, 60's leftovers and dreadlocked Aryans, all uncomfortably festooned in Palestinian scarves and "Nej Mot Krig" pins, have fallen conspicuously silent.

The Friday night parties and local pubs too seem different. The Swedes don't notice, but I do. Before the war, I was a curiosity to be inspected, analyzed and vetted for political acceptability. Random patrons and party-goers prodded me, hoping for an unconditional denunciation of some guy called "Doobelyou Booosh." When I refuse to take the bait--never turn stool pigeon abroad just to make quick friends, I beseech you--I was generally treated to a thirty minute polite polemic that always starts with the same eight words: "You know what I don't like about America." No Göran, but I can venture a pretty good guess. Americans talk a lot. We talk loudly and incessantly about anything and everything, although its usually ourselves. What we do, where we are from, where we went to university. Stuff that fellow Americans--forget the Swedes--rarely care about. And we do it with unrestrained pride, even if we are recounting a recent arrest for public indecency. Swedes barely say anything, until, that is, an American walks in.

But something has changed. They still gravitate to the strange man with the strange accent--the one who will surely entertain them with lurid tales of the wretched uninsured littering the streets, begging for state controlled health care, complaining about some untreated disease, violently clinging to the legs of bourgeois passersby. Someone that will regale them with stories of Booosh's hilarious verbal gaffes; the one's that prove how dumb we Americans are; how dumb I am. They still talk about that peculiar place called America, as usual, but not about the war, which is highly unusual.

Now, as the Saddam regime does its brilliant house-of-cards impression, my interlocutors have defaulted to stock material. "When women in Sweden get pregnant, we give them 15 years paid leave, a chalet in Gstaad and an autographed Roxette record. And you…you animals expect women to dig ditches for no pay…Michael Moore once said…"

It's only a slight overstatement to say that the average Swede is pushed from the womb armed with a heavy moral cudgel. That polite reminder is never far from their lips: We do it right, you do it wrong. And when war looms, the cudgel is swung with reckless abandon. When the same war is quick, comparatively clean and welcomed by many of its "victims"…deafening silence.

Like many countries in Europe, the Swedish newspaper industry prints brightly colored one-sheets advertising the day's top news. Aftonbladet and Expressen, the two main tabloids, advertise the day's headlines on sandwich boards and kiosks throughout the city, all printed on hyper-yellow paper with 200 point type. During the phony war and the Blixzeit, the tabloids abandoned its usual regiment of monarchal news, handball scores and reports on "Big Brother Sverige" to focus on unilateral, bullyboy America. When the war began, the editors dug in their heels, twisted their mustaches and waited for the civilian casualty figures to come across the wires. The first night of "shock and awe," according to Iraqi officials, resulted in 3 civilian deaths. An initial disappointment, for sure.

When a few ideologically committed Iraqis decided to shoot back, the tabloids reveled in the difficult resistance faced by the invaders--a new Vietnam would do irreparable harm to the Bush administration, who are universally loathed here, and puncture American "arrogance." When the resistance proved haphazard, half-hearted and no match for the better equipped, better trained Allies, the tabloid one-sheets quickly shifted gears, declaring that Sweden could expect "great summer weather," only to refocus on the war when the Americans entered Baghdad.

Like the "vaunted" Republican Guards, Aftonbladet and Expressen, my fellow party-goers and the squealing anti-war radicals have beat a hasty retreat. The marchers have refocused on Israeli "apartheid," the "War is Genocide" graffiti is fading, the anti-war buttons are disappearing.

Their war has resulted in colossal defeat. Their war was not one of amorphous, unsophisticated concepts like "Good and Evil", but rather a dogfight between ideologies--the "imperialist," capitalist United States versus a third-world backwater and a misunderstood religion. Their religion was a hybrid Marxism, the Iraqis Islam. Worlds apart, but close enough.

Now, the cacophonous shouts of "no war for oil" have become barely audible whispers about civilian casualties--a troubling, but very old malady in Baathist Iraq. Stockholm's popular dailies, who previously invested countless column inches to the anti-war cause, have stop harrumphing and started deflecting. Perhaps in a few months, when America's irrelevant enemies abroad produce a Mark Herold-inspired poster detailing civilian casualties, they will regroup. But for the most part, its time to say goodbye to all that. They will defeat America on another front, perhaps. They will always have Kyoto.

As the fiercest fighting draws to close, I am sifting through the debris of Europe's anti-war movement. The ideological revolution was contingent upon a great humanitarian disaster. Neither have happened. So what can they say in their defense? The ones who marched through democratic Sweden waving Iraqi flags? How do those opposed to war on a set of vague, lop-sided moral principals react when seeing cheering Iraqis swarm American Humvees, shouting that they, the wretched of the Earth, love Booooosh? I mean, what do they really think? Does anyone honestly believe that the scenes of liberation could ever trump their hatred of America's President? What about the Al-Samoud rockets, suspicious factories, POW executions, newly uncovered torture chambers, human shields, dead soldiers wearing gas masks, the cache of "ready to fire" Sarin-tipped missiles, the pathetic promises of a new, "creative" variety of "unconventional warfare"?

Prior to the war, the peaceniks operated on the principal of "plausible deniability"; we all knew Iraq was in violation of 1441, but who could conclusively prove it? To the hard-left the discoveries are mere inconveniences, CIA-planted speed bumps, predicated on a lie. The political conspiracy theorist always has an implausible answer for why his side lost: Israel planned 9-11, Germany was "stabbed in the back," there were no Cambodian "killing fields," the Holocaust was a large-scale typhus epidemic. There is, of course, little point in debating the cultists, the religious zealots, the righteously indignant. Ignore them and they won't go away, but it will significantly lower your blood pressure.

But for wide swaths of anti-war Sweden--the ones who think Marx and Engels are a German boy band--the reality of grateful Iraqis and the rapidity of American and British military success, this war dealt a crushing blow. So the war debate is relegated to the political fringe and the "mainstream" useful idiots have buried their heads in the sand.

It's sad, really. It feels like they have all come home to find Saddam in bed with another woman. And they would just rather not talk about it.

Michael Moynihan is a writer living in Stockholm, Sweden