Said: "Democracy traduced and betrayed"

Edward Said, prominent Palestinian intellectual, notes that the war in Iraq is already the most unpopular in modern history, and has been pushed forward with arrogance and racist pretensions of imperialism. The Bush cabal has hijacked the country and is about to lead us to disaster.

Democracy traduced and betrayed, democracy celebrated but in fact humiliated and trampled on by a tiny group of men who have simply taken charge of this republic as if it were nothing more than, what, an Arab country? It is right to ask who is in charge since clearly the people of the United States are not properly represented by the war this administration is about to loose on a world already beleaguered by too much misery and poverty to endure more.... As for the demagogues and servile intellectuals who talk about war from the privacy of their fantasy worlds, who gave them the right to connive in the immiseration of millions of people whose major crime seems to be that they are Muslims and Arabs?

Print this one out and deploy to upset those who keep happy residence in corrupt hegemony.

Scholars of Japan's Allied occupation oppose Iraq war

As we go forward to a glorious and overwhelming victory in the valley of civilization, some weakling pacifists ('professors') are objecting to the so-called 'Japanese model' of post-war occupation and rebuilding. Perhaps their strongest argument is that our government has not actually trained people in Iraqi society and culture, to help build a new civil order:

U.S. policy planning for postwar Japan began three years before the defeat. Thousands of Americans studied Japan's history and language and, in the last year of the war, underwent intensive training in civil administration. The occupation succeeded due in part to the detailed knowledge these administrative experts acquired about Japan's social and political institutions and culture. There is no evidence that the United States is now preparing a similar group of dedicated experts or developing comparable post-invasion policies consonant with Iraq's history, political system, and culture.

Cross your fingers. Everything will work out.