Mark Steyn notes the tragic symbolism of the Columbia's tragedy.

These days, American technology has to pace itself. But you don't have to believe, as NASA fretted in the weeks before launch, that this Shuttle could be a terrorist target to marvel at the almost perfect symbolism of Saturday's tragedy: the Columbia's crew included the first Israeli astronaut, Colonel Ilan Ramon; better yet, he was an Israeli who had participated in the successful raid on the Iraqi reactor at Osirak, back in the 1980s in those dark days before the policing of Saddam's nuclear programme was entrusted to Hans Blix; and, of course, the Shuttle came down over Texas, home state of the President and in the European press the favoured shorthand for what they see as the swaggering cowboy braggadocio of the US.

Indeed, you don't even have to be some Islamist death-cult loser in Ramallah to be dancing up and down in the street. Within an hour of the Shuttle's loss, a Canadian Broadcasting Corportation interviewer was gleefully asking her alleged expert whether the failure was due to American "arrogance", the same "arrogance" the Americans are currently demonstrating in the Middle East. The "expert" - a sci-fi writer - said no, it wasn't "arrogance". But an hour later the CBC was apparently citing mysterious "space experts" who thought "over-confidence" arising from Iraqi war fever had led Nasa to go ahead with the flight.