Oh, the seething. Oh, the whining. It’s another Naqba. Waaahh!

“Why did he fall that way? Why so fast?” asked Yemeni homemaker Umm Ahmed, tears streaming down her face. “He’s a coward. Now I feel sorry for his people.”

Arabs clustered at TV sets in shop windows, coffee shops, kitchens and offices to watch the astounding pictures of U.S. troops overwhelming an Arab capital for the first time ever. Feeling betrayed and misled, some turned off their sets in disgust when jubilant crowds in Baghdad celebrated the arrival of U.S. troops.

“We discovered that all what the [Iraqi] information minister was saying was all lies,” said Ali Hassan, a government employee in Cairo, Egypt. “Now no one believes Al-Jazeera anymore.”

No one except the American left, that is.