A terrific column from Mark Steyn, full of his trademark humor with a narsty bite: It’s been a good year. Read it all, of course, but I especially enjoyed the section about a certain whiny Baghdad blogger:

Meanwhile, anyone who thinks it will be decades before Arabs are ready for a Western-style society should consider the case of ‘Salam Pax’, an Iraqi Internet blogger —or ‘blogger’, as we old-media types say — who made a name for himself with his on-the-spot Baghdad diary in the run-up to the war and subsequently got taken on by the Guardian and brought to London. When Bush came to town last month, Salam was one of those whom the Guardian asked to pen an open letter to the President:

‘I hate to wake you up from that dream you are having, the one in which you are a superhero bringing democracy and freedom to underdeveloped, oppressed countries. But you really need to check things out in one of the countries you have recently bombed to freedom …Listen, habibi, it is not over yet. Let me explain this in simple terms. You have spilled a glass full of tomato juice on an already dirty carpet and now you have to clean up the whole room. Not all of the mess is your fault but you volunteered to clean it up. I bet if someone had explained it to you like that, you would have been less hasty going on our Rambo-in-Baghdad trip.’

Incredible. At the beginning of this year Salam Pax was just another typical oppressed Baghdadi, four of whose relatives had ‘gone missing’ (according to his Guardian biog.). But a couple of weeks in the company of Guardian editors and he’s been transformed into a note-perfect, sneering, metropolitan poseur, right down to the two-decade-old Rambo putdown. He sounds like a Channel 4 commissioning editor. Now you might think this is a tad ungrateful of Salam: some of that tomato juice on the rug is from his four missing relatives and, given that the Americans have seen to it that his own juice is no longer in danger of hitting the shagpile, it might be nice if he understood that, in the end, it’s in his interest to clean up the room more than Rambo’s. But personally I find it heartening: if the Americans can’t transform Iraq into New Hampshire, this snotty little twerp is living proof that you can at least turn it into Islington.