As you almost certainly already know, the attack on Iraq began about an hour and a half after the deadline ran out. The Allies fired some forty missiles into Baghdad, targeting political and military leaders. Saddam was a target. The Iraqis have fired two missiles into Kuwait, and there was a rumor that they contained gas; the rumor has been debunked. That's all the news there is so far; I'm flipping back and forth between Televisión Española, Catalunya TV, Tele 5, and Antena 3, but they haven't got much to report for now. It's a little after 11 AM here; the attack began at 3:40 AM our time, 5:40 AM Baghdad time, so the war is a little over seven hours old. I'll be home all day, between writing and blogging, so I'll keep y'all updated on what's happening here in Spain.

The newspapers on the stands this morning, with one exception, are all noncommittal; a good example is the Vanguardia's headline, "Attack Begins: Bush gives order to bomb selected targets; Iraqi leaders targets of attack; Cruise missiles and precision bombs fall on Baghdad at dawn; War begins hour and half after deadline." The Vangua's editorial page contains this sensible sentence, "Right now we can only hope for the rapid fall of Saddam Hussein and a minimum of victims, especially among the civilians." I can support that.

The exception is El Periódico, which is running this full-page headline in red and white letters on a black background: "The Illegal War Begins". Still, though, the papers didn't have much time to get anything thrown together.

Spain is sending three warships, the amphibious assault boat Galicia, the frigate Reina Sofía, and the tanker Marqués de la Ensenada, with a total of 900 men and women through the Med and the Suez Canal, down the Red Sea and around Arabia to Qatar. It should take them two weeks to get there, so hopefully they won't be needed. The Galicia has an emergency hospital with facilities to care for some 160 wounded, and among the 900 soldiers are several chemical and radiological cleanup teams and bomb and mine deactivation squads; those guys will certainly be useful after the war. Spain also has a competent paramilitary police, the Guardia Civil, who could send detachments to Iraq in the postwar period for civilian police purposes--somebody's got to patrol the streets and I imagine that Iraqi law enforcement has been rather discredited in the eyes of the people.

The first political reactions are in; Jordi Pujol, Prime Minister of Catalonia, is supporting the Aznar government and is walking the tightrope over supporting the war. All Pujol will say so far is that he doesn't think Aznar is acting illegally, but ethically he's against the war, but he understands why the Americans are nervous about Saddam, and that the French bungled the diplomatic negotiations, and that everybody wants Saddam to go, but "many people think that doing it through war seems excessive." Whichever way the war comes out, he can say he was right. Jordi Pujol is an old fox, the smartest politician in Spain. Aznar is the most courageous, though.

The Socialist reaction is to call the war illegal, and the Communists claim that they're gonna sue and take it all the way to the Constitutional Court. Juan José Ibarretxe of the Basque Nationalists, the Basque prime minister, sent a letter to Kofi Annan, of all people, saying "We Basques say absolutely no to the war and we will not participate either directly or indirectly." Of course, Mr. Ibarretxe is widely suspected of harboring sympathy for the ETA, and it's ridiculous to say that the Basques are united in saying anything to anything, since a minority of Basques has been trying to kill a majority of Basques and the rest of the Spaniards for the last thirty-five or so years. If my people were the group that had produced ETA, I'd be very careful about giving morality lessons to anyone else.