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Mark Steyn looks at the year just passed. A taste:

Seven months ago, there was so much hooey in the papers about Iraq that I decided to see for myself and had a grand time motoring round the Sunni Triangle. Lovely place, friendly people, property very reasonable. Why were my impressions so different from the doom-mongers at CNN or the New York Times? Well, it seems most media types holed up at the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad are still using their old Ba'athist minders as translators when they venture out. That would, at the very minimum, tend to give one a somewhat skewed perspective of the new Iraq.

But it only works because the fellows on the receiving end - the naysayers in the media and elsewhere - are so anxious to fall for it. One Saddamite pen-pusher at the museum could only peddle his non-existent sack of Baghdad to the world because, thanks to chaps like Jenkins, it was a seller's market.

And this:

Wolfowitz is a demonic figure to the anti-war types for little reason other than that his name begins with a big scary animal and ends Jewishly. But, if you want to know what he's really like, ask Ann Clwyd: "He was a very charming man, an intellectual," the Welsh firebrand told the Observer. Just so. I've been in his presence on a couple of occasions - he's very soft-spoken, thoughtful, not in the least bit lupine. He can reel off the names of gazillions of Iraqis he's been in touch with for years - Kurds, Shias, Sunnis.

Hastings mocks these contacts as "Iraqi stooges". But better a stooge than a vast anonymous tide of native extras, which is how Sir Max, whose Rolodex doesn't appear to be brimming with Ramadi and Mosul phone numbers, sees them. Where's the real "ignorance and conceit" here? No one who knows any Iraqis, as Ms Clwyd does, would compare Wolfowitz with the Soviets.

The real story of this past year is not Saddam, but something deeper, symbolised by the bizarre persistence of the "anti-war" movement even after the war was over. For a significant chunk of the British establishment and for most of the governing class on the Continent, if it's a choice between an America-led West or no West at all they'll take the latter. That's the trend to watch in the year ahead.

And here is 2003 as Steyn saw it, highlights and month by month. If you're new to Steyn -- or even if you're not -- don't miss it.